Art spiegelman in the shadow of no towers pdf

"The Shadow of a Past Time":

History and Graphic Representation in Maus

Hillary Chute

Because I grew up with parents who were always ready to see the world grid crumble, and when it started feeling that that was happening here and now, it wasn't a total surprise.... I think the one thing I really learned from my father was how to pack a suitcase.You know? It was the one thing he wanted to make sure I understood, like how to use every available centimeter to get as much stuff packed into a small space as possible. The ice might be thinner than one would like to think.

—Art Spiegelman (qtd. in D'Arcy 3)

In In the Shadow of No Toners, his most recent book of comic strips, Art Spiegelman draws connections between his experience of 9/11 and his survivor parents' experience of World War II, suggesting that the horrors of the Holocaust do not feel far removed from his present-day experi- ence in the twenty-first century.' "The killer apes learned nothing from the twin towers of Auschwitz and Hiroshima," Spiegelman writes; 9/11 is the "same old deadly business as usual" (n. pag.). Produced serially, Spiegelman's No lowers comic strips were too politically incendiary to find wide release in the United States; they were largely published abroad and in New York's weekly Jewish newspaper the Forward. In the Shadow of No Towers powerfully asserts that "the shadow of a past time (interweaves] with a present time," to use Spiegeimaii's own description of his Pulitzer- prize winning two-volume work Maus:A Survivor's Tale (Spiegelman qtd. in Silverblatt 35). In one telling panel there the bodies of four Jewish girls hanged in World War 11 dangle from trees in the Catskills as the Spiegel-

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Figure 1. Maus 11 79.

mans drive to the supermarket in 1979 (figure 1).- The persistence of the past in Maus, of course, does figure promi-

nently in analyses of the text's overall representational strategies. We see this, for instance, in Doniinick LaCapra's reading of the book's "thematic mode ot carnivalization" (175), Andreas Huyssen's theorizing of Adoniean mimesis in Maus, and Alan Rosens study of Vladek Spiegelman's broken English.-̂ Most readings of how Maus represents history approach the is- sue in terms of ongoing debates about Holocaust representation, in the context of postmodernism, or in relation to theories of traumatic memory. But such readings do not pay much attention to Maus's narrative form;'* the specificities of reading graphically, of taking individual pages as crucial units of comics grammar. The form o{ Maus, however, is essential to how it represents history. Indeed, Maus'^ contribution to thinking about the "crisis in representation " I will argue, is precisely in how it proposes that the medium of comics can approach and express serious, even devastating, histories."^

"I'm literally giving a form to my father's words and narrative," Spie- gelman observes about Maus, "and that form for me has to do with panel size, panel rhythms, and visual structures of the page" (Interview with Gary Groth 105, emphasis in original). As I hope to show, to claim that comics makes language, ideas, and concepts "hteral" is to call attention to how the medium can make the twisting lines of history readable through form.

When critics of Maus do examine questions of form, they often focus on the cultural connotations of comics rather than on the form's aesthetic capabilities— îts innovations with space and temporality.'' Paul Buhle, for

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instance, claims, "More than a few readers have described [MtJHi] as the most compelling of any [Holocaust] depiction, perhaps because only the caricatured quahty of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of an experience beyond all reason" (16). Where Michael Rothberg contends, "By situating a nonfictional story in a highly mediated, unreal, 'comic' space, Spiegelman captures the hyperintensity of Auschwitz" (206), Ste- phen Tabachnick suggests that Maus may work "because it depicts what was all too real, however unbelievable, in a tightly controlled and brutally stark manner.The black and white quality ot Maus's grapliics reminds one of newsprint" (155). But all such analyses posit too direct a relationship between form and content (unreal form, unreal content; all too real form, al! too real content), a directness that Spiegelman explicidy rejects.^

As with all cultural production that faces the issue of genocide, Spiegelman's text turns us to fundamental questions about the function of art and aesthetics (as well as to related questions about the knowability and the transmission of history; as Hayden White asserts, "Maus manages to raise all of the crucial issues regarding the 'limits of representation' in general'" |421).Adorno famously interrogated the fraught relation of aesthetics and Holocaust representation in two essays from 1949, "Cul- tural Criticism and Society" and "After Auschwitz"—and later in the enormously valuable "Commitment" (1962), which has been the basis of some recent important meditations on form.** In "Cultural Criticism" Adorno charges,"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (34).'' We may understand what is at stake as a question of betrayal; Adorno worries about how sufFering can be given a voice in art "without immediately being betrayed by it" ("Commitment" 312); we must recognize "the possibility of knowing history," Cathy Caruth writes, "as a deeply ethi- cal dilemma; the unremitting problem o{ how not to betray the past" (27, Caruth's italics). I argue that Maus, far from betraying the past, engages this ethical dilemma through its form. Elaborating tropes like "the presence of the past" through the formal complexities of what Spiegelman calls the "stylistic surface" of a page {Complete Maus)y^^* I will consider how Maus represents history through the time and space of the comics page.

In the hybrid form of comics, two narrative tracks never exactly syn- thesize or fully explain each other.'' In "their essence," Spiegelman says, comics

are about time being made manifest spatially, in that you've got all these different chunks of time—each box being a differ-

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ent moment of time—and you see them all at once. As a result you're always, in comics, being made aware of different times inhabiting the same space. (qtd. in Silverblatt 35)

Comics are composed in panels—also called frames—and in gutters, the rich empty spaces between the selected moments that direct our inter- pretation.The effect of the gutter lends to comics its "annotation" of time as space.'- "Time as space" is a description we hear again and again from theorists of comics. However, it is only when one recognizes how Maus is able to effectively approach history through its spatiality that one ap- preciates the form's grasp on nuanced political expression. Emphasizing how comics deals in space, as I do here, highlights how this contemporary, dynamic medium both informs and is informed by postmodern politics in a productive, dialogical process. Space, Fredric Jameson contends, is the perceptual modality of postmodernity (Postmodernism 154-80); and where the dominant rhetoric of modernism is temporal, Susan Stanford Friedman argues, postmodernism adopts a rhetoric of space—of location, multiphcity, borderlands, and, I would add, boundary crossings.'-'

In the epigraph to this essay, describing how his father taught him to pack a suitcase to "use every available centimeter to get as much stuff packed into a small space as possible," Spiegelman alludes to his father's experiences in wartime Poland. Yet the historical lesson also shapes Spiegelman's formal preoccupations. Throughout Maus he represents the complicated entwining of the past and the present by "packing" the tight spaces of panels. He found an "architectonic rigor . . . necessary to understand to compose the pages of Maus," he explains (qtd. in Silverblatt 33), and has commented; "Five or six comics on one piece of paper . . . [I am] my father's son" (Spiegelman, Address).'"' It is to this effect that Maus exploits the spatial form of graphic narrative, with its double-encodings and visual installment of paradoxes, so compellingly, refusing telos and closure even as it narrativizes history. In this light, I will analyze a range of sections of the book; some that have been treated comparatively litde in Maus criticism, such as the multitemporal pane! in the embedded comic strip "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" and the double epitaph of the book's last page, and some that have not been treated at all, such as the scene that centers on a timeline of Auschwitz.

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Bleeding and rebuilding history The first volume o{ Maus is subtitled, significantly. My Father Bleeds His- /t>r)'.The slow, painful efiusion of history in this "tale," the title suggests, is a bloodletting; its enunciation and dissemination are not without cost to Vladek Spiegelman (indeed, it is his headstone that marks, however un- stably, the ending of Maus). In suggesting that the concept of "history" has become and is excruciating for Vladek, the title also implies an aspect of the testimonial situation we observe over the course o{ Maus's pages; the fact that, as Spiegelman reports, his father had "no desire to bear witness" (Interview with Joey Cavalieri et al. 192). Indeed, throughout much of the book,Vladek would clearly prefer, we see, to complain about his rocky second marriage. Towards the end of the second volume of Mdwi, Vladek protests to Artie,"All such things of the war, I tried to put out of my mind once and for all. . . . Until you rebuild me all this from your questions" (98).'^ Vladek's bleeding is his son Artie's textual, visual (as well as emo- tional) rebuilding. Spiegelman as author is distinctly aware of Artie the character's shades of vampirism, however well-intentioned. And the idea of "bleeding" history (at the demand of a son) acquires further poignancy when one realizes—as transcripts of the taped interviews between Vladek and Art Spiegelman on the CD-ROM llie Complete Maus reveal—that Vladek and his wife, Anja Spiegelman, never spoke to each other in de- tail about their (literally unspeakable) experiences in the camps.'* This "bleeding" of history is not an easy process; Anja's diaries, for instance, as Vladek explained, were too full of history to remain extant after her death;"! had to make an order with everything. . .These papers had too many memories. So I burned them" (Maus I, 158). Art Spiegelman's nar~ rativization of his parents' history, then, as many critics have pointed out, is also his own making "an order with everything." He reconstructs his- tory in his own language—comics—in frames and gutters, interpreting and interrupting as he rebuilds.'^ Comics frames provide psychic order; as Spiegelman recently remarked about 9 / l l ; " I f I thought in page units, I might live long enough to do another page" (Gussow).

Maus's chapter l ,"The Sheik," zoonis into history. In the middle of its second page is a panel packed with signifiers of the past and present, jammed together in a long rectangular frame, only an inch high, that spans the width of the page (figxire 2). In a space that was once Artie's bedroom (a pennant proclaiming "Harpur," Spiegelman's college, is still pinned to the wall),Vladek, his camp tattoo visible for the first time, pumps on an

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Exercycle. Not moving forward, he is literally spinning his wheels. This suspension is also indicated by the fact that a full view of his body, locked into position, appears across frames on the page: his head in panel four, his torso in panel five, his foot in panel seven.The wide berth of his arms frames Artie, who sits and smokes. looking small A framed photo—of the dead Anja Spiegelnian, we will later find out-—is propped on a desk to the right of both men, representing both an object of desire and a rebuke. In a speech balloon on the left that echoes the photograph and tattoo on the right, as if the past—articulated (spoken), inscribed (tattooed), docu- mented (photographed)—were Hanking both men, closing in on them, Vladek proclaims:"lt would take many books, my life, and no one wants anyway to hear such stories" (12).

From the start, Spiegelman crams his panels with markers of the past (the camp tattoo, prewar photographs) and the ultimate marker of the present:Artie Spiegelman himself, framed by his fathers body, his parents' postwar child, born in Sweden after the couple lost their first son to the Nazis. And while the horizontally elongated panel implies a stillness—its page-spanning width eliminates any gutter, where the movement of time in comics happens—it yet registers Vladek's first moments of dipping into the past. While Vladek verbally refuses to offer "such stories," the panel below, an iris diaphragm depicting his dapper young self ("really a nice, handsome boy" [13]) in the early 1930s, pushes up into the rectangular panel of the present, its curve hitting the handlebars of Vladek's Exer- cycle between his grasping hands."* This protruding circular frame can be figured as the wheel to Vladek's Exercycle. Spiegelman points out, "You enter into the past for the first time through that wheel" (Complete Maus).

The visual intersection of past and present appears throughout in the architecture of panels. In chapter 3 of Maus I, "Prisoner of War," Artie sprawls across the floor of his father's Rego Park, Queens, home, pencil in hand, notebook open, soliciting stories (45. figure 3). Artie s legs span decades. Looking up at his sitting father, facing forward toward the direc- tion of the unfolding narrative, Artie's legs are yet mired in tbe past: they conspicuously overlap—indeed, unify—the panel depicting 1939 and the one depicting the conversation in 1978. Artie's body, then—in the act of writing, of recording—is visually figured as the hnk between past and present, disrupting any attempt to set apart Vladek's history from the discursive situation of the present.

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The connection between past and present in this chapter is also emphasized by verbal parallels. Vladek, for instance, describes a grueling POW work detail, in which a German soldier demands that a filthy stable be spotless in an hour. Interrupting his own recollection,Vladek suddenly bursts out, "But look what you do, Artie! You're dropping on the car- pet cigarette ashes.You want it should be like a stable here?" (52).Joshua Brown points out that this incident—which he identifies as one of many "interstices of the testimony"—suggests that "Vladek's account is not a chronicle of undefiled fact but a constitutive process, that remembering is a construction of the past" (95). And the ways in which the past invades the present recollection, or vice vena, gradually grow more ominous: in the beginning of Maus comparisons may involve issues like cleanliness, but by the second volume. Spiegelman will draw Artie s cigarette smoke as the smoke of human flesh drifting upward from the crematoria of Auschwitz {Maus ^'

. f Inheriting the past, packing a panel The most striking instance of representing past and present together in Maus I is the inclusion of the autobiographical comic strip "Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History" (1972) in the text of Maus. Breaking the narrative How of Maus, interrupting its pagination, style, and tone, "Prisoner on the HeU Planet" enters into the story, it would seem, from outside, registering confrontationally—and materially—the presence

Figure 3. Mam 145.

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of the past. First published in an underground comic book. Short Order Comix 1, it narrates the immediate aftermath of the 1968 suicide of Spiegelman's mother, Auschwitz survivor Anja Spiegelman, at his family's home in Queens.

Readers are introduced to the existence of "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" at the same time that a calendar is first made conspicuous in Maus, in the panel in which his stepmother Mala startles Artie by men- tioning "that comic strip you once made—the one about your mother" (99). This calendar appears in five of eight panels preceding "Prisoner" and in eight out of the nine panels on the page directly following it, but this representation of the linear movement of time is disrupted by the intrusion of "Prisoner," which does not seamlessly become part of the fabric of the larger narrative but rather maintains its alterity. Featuring human characters, it is clearly distinct from the rest of Maus in its basic representational methodology; its heavy German Expressionist style is an unsubtle analog to the angry emotional content of the strip. Maus's. page numbers stop while "Prisoner" unfolds; and the older strip's pages are set against a black, unmarked background, forming what Spiegelman calls a "funereal border" that stands out as a thick black line when the book is closed {Complete Maus).

"Prisoner" is Artie s earliest testament to what Marianne Hirsch persuasively describes as "postmemory" ("Projected Memory" 8). a now oft-cited term that she first conceived of in relation to M(3i«."" And while this visual and nar- rative rupture of the text suggests what and how the past continually means in the present, I want to focus in particular on one packed panel on "Prisoner"'s last page (figure 4). Like the volume in which it is embedded, "Prisoner" spatially depicts multiple temporalities in single visual- verbal frames. If Spiegelman claims that he feels very much like his '̂ father's son" when he draws five comics on one page, here we see five different moments in one panel, criss-crossed by text that alter- nates sentiments corresponding with the Figure 4. Maus 1103.

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frame's accreted temporalities: We get "Moinniy!" (the past) but we also get "Bitch" (the present); we get "Hitler Did It!" (the past) but we also get "Menopausal Depression" (the present) (t03). Approaching the past and the present together is typical for someone considering narratives of causality, but here Spiegelman obsessively layers several temporalities in one tiny firame, understood by the conventions of the comics medium to represent one moment in time. Artie's childhood bedroom is contiguous with a concentration camp; Anja's disembodied arm, readying for her sui- cide, floats out from the body of the youngster Artie, its thumb just about touching the leg of the adult Artie, who sits in despair on what looks like her casket.

This frame, smaller than 2 inches by 2 inches, depicts several images from different time periods: Anja's dead body in the bathtub; a heap of anonymous dead bodies piled high underneath a brick wall painted with a swastika; Anja reading to the child Artie; Anja cutting her wrist, her tattooed number fully visible on her forearm; the young man Artie in mourning, wearing the same Auschwitz uniform he wears even as a child, happily listening to his mother read. "Prisoner," then, posits that Artie inherited the burden that the uniform represents, in a natural transfer of pain that wasn't consciously accepted or rejected but seamlessly assumed. '̂ He earned his stripes at birth.

i

Maus II: Making an order In Maus 11: And Here My Troubles Began Spiegelman's self-reflexivity is a strategy specific to representing the Holocaust. By explicitly centering portions of the text on its own enunciative context, he offers his doubts as to his adequacy to represent the Holocaust, as a secondary witness and as a cartoonist. He assiduously explores his feelings about Maus I in Maus II, whose subtitle, after all, refers not only to Vladek's statement made after he left Auschwitz ("Here, in Dachau, my troubles began" [91]), but also to Spiegelmans own success with Maus I ("things couldn't be going better with m.y 'career,' or at home, but mostly I feel like crying" [43]). The most metafictional section in the volume is the "Time flies" episode (41—46). While "Prisoner" represents a retextualization and resignifica- tion of a past narrative into a nevi'er, yet still provisional one,"Time flies" works as a projection forward, a meditation on the viability of the present project.""

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The double voicing of Maus—Arties voice and his father's—presents a view of narrative generally and testimony specifically as a polyvalent weave.--* Testimony and memory here are collaborative procedures gen- erated by both speaker and listener. Further, the play of voices in Maus is complicated in light of Spiegelman's position that comics provides a "visual voice in the artist's hand" (qtd. in D'Arcy 2). In this Holocaust representation, the artist's hand is the visibilized link between the per- sonal voice of the primary witness and its translation, the voice of the secondary witness: as such, Spiegelman's hands are frequently pictured in Maus, and his "artistic hands" are the subject of conspicuous conversation between him and his father. The comics medium, as Spiegelman makes us aware, is not only dialogic—able to represent the competing voices of autobiography and biography in one layered text—but cross-discursive, as when Spiegelman draws against his father's verbal narration, turning what he calls the "cognitive dissonance" between the two of them into representational collision (Silverblatt 32). (One prominent example of the son battling his father's verbal testimony with his own visual medium is Spiegelmans drawing of an only just visible orchestra playing as prisoners march out of the gates of Auschwitz, contradicting Vladek's firm vocal insistence that no orchestra was present.)^''

Both Artie and Vladek want to order historical narrative. But Vladek's order—poignantly, understandably—involves a t^egridding. He wants to dismantle, to destroy in order to forget ("I had to make .in order with everything .. .These papers had too many memories. So I burned them" [Maus I 159]), even as his account is teased out by his son over a period of years. While Vladek's order is a defenestration, Artie wants to build windows, to resurrect; Spiegelman's language is that he "materializes" Vladek's words and descriptions in Maus (qtd. in lirown 98). In the intro- duction to his 1977 collection Breakdoums, which contains the three-page prototype for Maus, Spiegelman attaches the concept of narrative to the spatial, "niateriahzing" work of comics:

My dictionary defines COMIC STRIP as 'a narrative series of cartoons.. .'A NARRATIVE is defined as 'a story.' Most defini- tions of STORY leave me cold... Except for the one that says 'A complete horizontal division of a building.. . [From Medieval Latin HISTORIA... a row of windows with pictures on them)"'

(n. pag.; Spiegelman's brackets)

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And Spiegelman speaks of the act of ordering a comics narrative in frames as a kind of necessary reckoning: "The parts that are in the book are now in neat little boxes. I know what happened by having assimilated it that fully. And that's part of my reason for this project, in fact" (qtd. in Witek 101). Working with his father's slippery, strange, non-linear, incomplete testimony, Spiegelman is drawn to the concept of imposing formal or- der. ̂ ^ It comes as no surprise, then, that at one point he was drawn to a high modernist ethic of representation for Maus; he thought he should compose the book "in a more joycean way" (qtd. in Brown 94) .Yet finally, Spiegelman ceded the structure of a Ulysses for the mere structural con- tainment of "neat little boxes," a description that evokes both a hopeful (if impossible) burial of the past in coffin-panels, and the flill, packed suitcases that are his father's history lesson for the present.

The difference in the way Vladek and Artie each "order" history registers clearly in a crucial scene in which Artie's attempt to chrono- logically account for Vladek's time in Auschwitz provides the basis for disagreement. While Artie emphasizes Vladek's time there, Vladek insists on the space of his Auschwitz experience. Appropriately, then, in the chapter "Auschwitz (time f̂ ies)," Maus presents a timeline of 1944 which is the only explanatory' diagram not part of the authorial purview of Vladek (figure 5). (Diagrams are a recurring subject, a mode of representation, and a collaborative textual practice in Maus, where, with this exception, they are organic to Vladek's narrative thread.) This diagram represents a disagreement; the son is "imposing order" while the survivor, caught up in his testimony, resists that historiographic impulse.

Artie wants to present a lucid and chronological narrative of his father's months in 1944, but Vladek resists Artie's accounting: "In Aus- chwitz we didn't wear watches" (68). When Artie draws a diagram for Maus, then, he draws it as the site of a father-son battle. Spiegelman pres- ents his own desire for linear order andVladek's resistance to that kind of order in an especiaUy complex fashion. The diagram pierces three rows of frames. It begins at the end of the page's first tier, where it blocks a corner of Vladek's speech balloon, interrupting a first-person sentence. "I—" Vladek starts, before our eyes run up against a black-rimmed timeline, its corners sharp (68).

The timeline begins in March 1944 and continues down verti- cally, representing Vladek's Auschwitz activity: quarantine, tin shop, shoe shop, black work. It does not occupy the furthermost space of the page.

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however, but is recontextualized, if only teasingly, by the shrubs poking niessily out from its right margin. Moreover, while the diagram cuts off Vladek's speech in the first tier and his shoulder in the second tier, in the third der it is itself interrupted by Artie's wife Franfoise's speech bal- loon—"YOOHOO! I was looking for you." We have, then, the present layered thickly by the past, framed tentatively by the present, layered again by the past, and interrupted by a present-day exclamation, a burst of the banal: lunch time. Directly under the timeline, Fran^oise calls attention to the tangle of temporalities in a comment as applicable, in the haunting abstract, to Vladek's months in Auschwitz as it is to the length of Artie's stroll around the bungalows: "I was worried.You were gone a long time" (68). t

Superimposed over the frames, the timeline makes the sort of histo- riographic gesture that the overall narrative, shuttling rapidly back and forth from past to present, does not attempt, and that Vladek cannot of- fer. As Spiegelman puts it: "The number of layers between an event and somebody trying to apprehend that event through time and interme- diaries is like working with flickering shadows" (qtd. in Brown 98). He thus represents the accreted, shifting "layers" of historical apprehension not only through language but also through the literal, spatial layering of comics, enabling the presence of the past to become radically legible on die page.

i The question of closure Pointing to Maus's specific argument about temporality and the represen- t.ition of history, one anecdote is particularly telling about the political work Maus accomplishes. Spiegelman acted as a catalyst to get a show about Bosnia at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.-— "̂a show which, to me, was a justification of that museums existence," he says. (Spiegelman had rejected the idea of having a show about Maus there: "The Holocaust Museum didn't need Maus, and Maus didn't need the authority of the Holocaust Museum to make itself understood") (Inter- view with Andrea Juno 16).''' Spiegebnan wanted to call the Bosnia show "Genocide Now." The museum drew back. As Spiegelman narrates the museum's objection:

"Does it have to be called Genocide Now? Got a better one? Can't we just talk about the atrocities in former Yugo-

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slavia?" Well, if the situation looks and smells like genocide, it probably is. They were still against the title, and the best alterna- tive I could come up with was: 'Never Again and Again and Again.' They didn't like that title either, and that was about the time I checked out. (Interview with Andrea Juno 16)

This insistence, "Genocide Mur," is a refusal to see "the past" as past— which is an adamant, ethical argument that Maus undertakes through the temporal and spatial experimentation that the narrative movement of comics offers. "Genocide Now" is blunt, grim, unflinching. But even its lesser incarnation, "Never Again and Again and Again," expresses the continuousness of history as "what hurts" (as Jameson puts it), as our non-divorce fk)m the traumatic events of the past, the impossibility of rejecting horror as ever completely "behind us" (102).This title strtMigly recalls Spiegelnian's own choice of an internally repetitive title tor his recent collection of work, From Maus to Now to Maus to Now, which itself posits the historical trauma represented in Maus as unending. Spiegelman insists on the persistence of trauma—in his choices of titles, in his textual practice of spatial intrusion, overlaying, and overlapping—in order to show how memory can be treated as an ongoing creative learning pro- cess, rather than something anchored in insuperable trauma. On the pages of Maus, Spiegelman shows us the violation and breaking of the "world grid" in both senses of the term—phenomenologically and literally on the page. Spiegelman's overtly political suggestion—which he registers in literal, graphic fra me-breaking—is that the past is present, again and again and again: Maus questions the framework ot ever^'day lite that is taken for granted. As Robert Storr asserts of the obscene mouse-head corpses "piled like crumpled wastepaper" under Artie's feet in the section "Time flies" while he sits at his drawing board, contemplating his project: "this is not a sick joke but evidence of the heartsickness that motivates and pervades the book: it is the gallows humor of a generation that has not faced an- nihilation but believes utterly in its past reality and future possibility" (28). MdHji's enmeshed temporalities suggest a line of thinking that indeed stems from such a worldview. In his latest work. Spiegelman admits to having an "existential conviction that I might not live long enough to see [In the Shadow of No Towers] published" (np).

The effect of visually, spatially linking the past and the present as Maus does is to urgently insist on history as an "untranscendable horizon" (Jameson 102). "Instead of making comics into a narcotic, I'm trying to

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make comics that can wake you up, like caffeine comics that get you back in touch with things that are happening around you," says Spiegelman (qtd. in Silverblatt 31). Indeed, Maus's challenging multivocality, cross- discursivity, and the thick surface texture of its pages demand a reading process that engages the reader in an act of consumption that is explicitly anti-diversionary.

In "Collateral Damage," a PMLA editor's column introducing an is- sue that explores visuality and literary studies, Marianne Hirsch focuses crucial attention on In the Shadow of NoTowers and on the form of comics generally.-^ She asks:"What kind of visual-verbal literacy can respond to the needs of the present moment?" (1212).As Hirsch shows in her analysis of No Towers, certainly Spiegelman s work is one important place to go. Spiegelman himself expresses strong views about the literacy that comics require and hone: "It seems to me that comics have already shifted from being an icon of illiteracy to becoming one of the last bastions of literacy," he has said (Interview with Gary Groth 61)."If comics have any problem now, it's that people don't even have the patience to decode comics at

this point I don't know if we're the vanguard of another culture or if we're the last blacksmiths."

Historical graphic narratives today draw on a popular form once considered solely distracting in order to engage serious political questions. We see in Maus faith in "making hopefiil use of popular forms," to use a phrase of Neil Nehring's (36)—the (post)utopian impulse evident in Spiegelman s earlier work such as Raw, the magazine that declared it had "lost its faith in nihilism" (Raw 3, July 1981). Charles Bukowski wrote Spiegeiman in the late 1970s, "Ah, you guys are all ministers in Popeye suits" (qtd. in Silverblatt 36).To the allegation of masking high moral se- riousness with "the popular," Spiegelman responded, "Most of the artists in Raw—I won't say every single one of them—are moving forward from a moral center. As a result, it seemed to me to be interesting to be able to make ethics hip."

Indeed, the graphic narrative is a contemporary form that is helping to expand the cultural map of historical representation. Its expansive vi- sual-verbal grammar can offer a space for ethical representation without problematic closure. Maus is a text inspirited with an intense desire to rep- resent politically and ethically. But it is not a didactic text pushing moral interpretations or solutions.̂ '̂ An author "moving forward from a moral center" is not the same as an author presenting an authoritative morality

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tale of history—a concept that Spiegelman s text vehemently Maus defines itself against niorality tales as Gertrud Koch describes them: narratives that "endeavor to convince us of their own moral qualifica- tions and blur the dark and destructive future the past often presents to its victims" (406). As its stunning last page makes apparent. Mans 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 productive, cross-discursive collisions.'"

As Spiegelman notes, Maus's last page "just keeps ending" {Complete Maus). It both suggests the ethical value of narrative and insists that no voice could or should have the last word, thus suggesting the work of memory as a public process.'^' Through a form th.it "folds in on itself in order to get out," the ending of Maus moves beyond the particularity of its "tale," inviting the reader to join in a collective project of meaning- making (Complete Maus).

As its grim ending so clearly reveals, Maus does not offer—with sin- cerity—the narrative closure that would seal a traditionally moral story. Maus's last page breaks the frame because it is innovative in its spacing, ontologically suggesting that there is no closure, no "ending," no telos.•̂ '̂ Unsurprisingly, the last page of Maus does not have a page number; it is not stamped with a linear logic of progression. In a way, Maus does end the most traditional way a narrative can: with a literal claim of"happy ever after." And it ends the most literal way a biography can: with the death of its subject. But like so much postmodern fiction, Maus offers, exploits, and undercuts the most traditional of happy endings (romantic reunion; family romance). And, like so much biography, it offers and undercuts that most traditional of structural principles: life dates.

The last page of Maus is charged with movement: the narrative accel- erates and decelerates—if one can call it that—rapidly (figure 6). The page offers six panels, two on each row, and each pair of frames works off of an opposition.The first tier moves from outside to inside, from the open Sosnowiec street to a close view of the Jewish Organization building (a speech balloon juts out from its closed window).The second tier moves from a position of graphically stark apartness (Vladek, dressed in white, and Anja, dressed in black, tace each other disbelievingly across a room) to a position of dramatic togetherness (Vladek and Anja embrace in front of an iris diaphragm). In the third tier's first panel,Artie sits as if anchored to his fiUher's bed, and in the second panel, Artie stands, leaving; in the first

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Figure 6. Maus I1136.

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panel Artie is Art, and in the second, his father names him Richieu (the name of his long dead brother, who did not survive the war); in the first panel Vladek faces Artie—and the reader—and in the second he rolls over and turns away, bending his arm over his face. Essentially, for the readers of Maus. in that last moment he dies, for the next image Spiegelman presents is his tombstone, balanced exactly in the middle of the two last frames, its Star of David shooting up the gutter. The Spiegelman tombstone rises up into this bottommost tier of frames, splitting the two panels synmietrically. The literally central presence of the tombstone's Star of David on the last page of Maus, then, is a key affirmation of Judaism, for this prominently placed symbol resignifies: Spiegelman recalls the Star as a mark of hatred and oppression on the Nazi-enforced badges that are so prevaleiit in the first volume of Maus., reversing the "mark" to attest to the enduring sur- vival of Judaism and Jews.̂ -̂

Immediately we notice that balanced below the headstone, marked with the uppercase "SPIEGELMAN," is a lowercase echo, a reply to this death—Art Spiegelman's signature, and the dates he worked on Maus: "art spiegelman 1978-1991."The narrative atgument of this page is in its spacing, its echoes and replies, its gulfs and repetitions, what it buries and what it at once engenders. Narrative closure (death, marriage) is often, especially in postmodern fiction, questioned by epilogues.'** Spiegelman's signature—shaggy, stylized, undercase—and the tombstone that he places exactly in the center of a symmetrical page, is that very questioning "epi- logue." As ever, Spiegelman competes with his father's narrative while at the same time faithfully representing it. Spiegelman's signature—not an extra-narrative detail or flourish but part of the (post-plot) narrative itself, does not represent closure or finality. The Spiegelman signature, echoing the engraving on the Spiegelman parental tombstone, marks the narrative's awareness of the falsity of Maus's patently unhappy "happy ending."Vladek and Anja did not live "happy, happy, ever after," as Vladek claims in the narrative voiceover that accompanies their reunion embrace. The doubled inscriptions, epitaphic and autographic, show us that Spiegelman does not intend to let his father have the "last word" (even as he might desire the incredible delusion behind the inaccurate "happy ever after"). The last spoken words in Maus areVladek's:"lt's enough stories for now..." (emphasis and ellipses in original).The "story" suggested by the tombstone, though, is one that Vladek does not himself narrate (Anja's suicide), but of which readers of Maus are aware. The traumatic stories, Maus implies, go on after

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its last image and will continue to come in the future; in this way, Maus, while a "survivor's tale," is not a morality tale. Maus rather exploits and resists the happy ending that punctuates a morality tale.

In M£iH.s's last page,Vladek and Anja reunite after Auschwitz, and Maus completes its family romance. "V-Vladek!" cries Anja. "Gasp," manages Vladek. In his narrative voiceover to Artie,Vladek describes that "It was such a moment that everybody around us was crying together with us." In the next panel the couple embrace as in an old Hollywood movie, in the center of a dramatic iris diaphragm, their faces buried in each other's shoulders.Vladek narrates: "More, I don't need to tell you. We were both very happy, and lived happy, happy ever after."The intra-textual reference for Maus\ last page is a page in Maus Fs Chapter Two, "The Honeymoon." In this scene, which takes place before the war breaks out definitively, the dressed-up Spiegelmans dance closely with each other (at Anja's sanitari- um) in front of an iris diaphragm, in six separate frames (35).Vladek tells Anja, as the two dance, an amusing story about his father's pillow, which the elder Spiegelman had retrieved at great peril when the family fled the 1914 war (in Maus's last page,Vladek Spiegelman will place his arm, in a gesture of exhausted finality, across his pillow, almost like a child set- tling down to sleep). In this page's final panel, when Vladek completes the punchline, about his fathers safe return but horse-sore behind, Anja—in the same posture as in Maus's dramatic final page—embraces Vladek, her arms around his neck. "I love you, Vladek," she says. Vladek's voiceover narration, in a box below the image—as in Mi3((5 s ending—is as follows: "And she was so laughing and so happy, so happy that she approached each time and kissed me, so happy she was" (35).

This repetition of "happy" three times is echoed in Maus's conclusion, which correspondingly, unbelievably repeats "happy" three times: "We were both very happy, and lived happy, happy ever after." Of course, how- ever, although they embrace as if in a melodramatic film still at the end of Vladek's testimony, readers of Mam know that the Spiegelmans' narratives do not end happily. Instead, Maus's last sequence shows, as Gertrud Koch puts it, the "endlessness of sadness" (403). Anja did not live "happy ever after": even if the text had not earlier referenced her suicide, the tomb- stone punctuating the page clearly shows she died 14 years before Vladek, at age 56. And Vladek, as we well know, devastated by Anja's death, in ill health, was often estranged from his only son and unhappy in his second marriage.

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On one hand, the doubling of nomenclature (a representation of engraving, the "SPIEGELMAN" inscribed in stone—and its mimicry, the representation of authorial "voice" and performance, the "art spiegelman" inscribed in ink below the drawn grave) indicates Spiegehnan s attention to the idea of text as a social space, here particularly as a collaborative fab- ric created by father and son (and absent mother) that produces no single master of enunciation, but several interacting enunciators. It is clear that Maus subverts, even as it installs, the singularity and originality implied in signature {Poetics 81). But here Spiegelman's narrative (implied in the open-endedness that his signature unexpectedly delivers) also competes with his father's narrative of closure. Terms like "polyphonic" or "dialogic" come to mind, but the page, intermixed in its "conversation" with dif- ferent media, is more complicated than a rubric like dialogism indicates, since Spiegelman responds to his fathers verbal narrative visually, by drawing his gravesite and drawing his own signature. Reading this page, one is reminded, as Felman points out, that testimony often functions as signature. Here Spiegelman's literal signature competes with the signature of Vladek's testimony. Spiegelman is here, as ever, doing (more than) two things at once, contradictorily preserving and questioning his father's nar- rative. Spiegelman's visual post-dialogue epilogue is at once oppositional (calling our attention to the stories told on the tombstone as a rejoinder to his father's "ever after" conclusion), and commemorative, a tribute to his parents, a supplement to Vladek's testimonial signature that he marks with his own literal signature: a deferring, lowerca.se inscription.