Other frustrations studying Maus
Oct. 11th, 2011 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have trouble with the subject matter in Maus. I can't spend too long thinking about the Holocaust. It's a horror too huge to comprehend. So I bounce off and look at the frame and suchlike. Not so much good.
But it irritates me disproportionately when the crit about Maus does two things: it goes on about how it's not like other comics, and it goes on about how it's not really about mice. It's like, this one is the good comic, this one is the valuable comic, it's not using any of those stupid comic tricks, in fact lets not even call it a comic! It's way better than all those others! And yet quite often you get the feeling they haven't studied many of them others, and may in fact be forming their opinions based on an inferior issue of Superman. Comics are not exactly short on visual tricks and metaphorical layers. Especially if you steer away from the equivalent of the summer blockbusters.
And then there's the thing about the mice. Apparently Spiegelman says that he drew them as mice and cats and all because then you would look at it all and think that's wrong, they shouldn't be animals, they're all people. The quote is in one of the six long things I just read, sorry. And, okay, that's an interesting approach. Use an extended metaphor to get people to be really fed up with that metaphor. But the crit keeps saying about how they're not mice, they're people in mouse masks. And that's plain wrong. Within the art, there's three different ways of drawing people: There's the usual ones where they are mice and cats and pigs and stuff, there's the ones where the mice are pretending to be pigs so they are drawn as mice in pig masks, and there's the bit in the middle where the little artist picture at an artist studio drawing is saying how hard it all is to draw, and in that bit there are humans with human ears and they are wearing masks of mice and pigs and cats and dogs and everything. The artist with human ears in a mouse mask tied on with string sort of shrinks down into being drawn as a mouse with no mask lines or string lines or spare ears. So there's a distinct difference between the two, the transition is shown as significant. When the crit is saying actually they're not mice they're people, that's not engaging with the text, that's tossing out the metaphor. It's not trying to see what it actually does. They aren't people wearing mouse masks, so why aren't they? Why is it important when the artist is in a mask and when he's being mouse shaped again? Crit doesn't care, these big long essays don't care, because secretly everyone is humans anyway. :-p to that, look at the actual pictures! Ignore what the author says unless he says it on the page.
On the page it says he gets shrunk into mouseness. So it's something about loss and trapping and restriction, to be a mouse, not a human in a mask. It's something about being perceived not as having this attribute you can put on and take off, but as being in essence, essentially, for real this other kind of thing. Perception by others or by self? Big complicated. But there's a bit where a mouse is telling everyone he's a cat, and the narrator level has Art asking his father if the guy was really a mouse person or a cat person, and he says something like, who knows, to the Germans he was a Jew. (the book is in a bag somewhere. One of two bags. Neither of which I can reach from here. Is bad quoting practice.) But the thing is, the guy is drawn as a mouse person, and as a cat person, but neither way is he drawn as wearing a mask. When the Jews are mice pretending to be Polish pig people they wear a pig mask. If he was a mouse person wearing a cat mask then he would be pretending, or indeed if he was a cat wearing a mouse mask, even if someone else put it on him, which would be easy to draw. But he isn't drawn that way, he's either a mouse person or a cat person, no masks. And he's mostly drawn mouse. Because he's perceived that way. It isn't a mask he can take off. Whichever he is, he just is... but he doesn't get to choose which one he is. Social perception and labelling by the powerful call him a mouse, so a mouse he is stuck as. That's not a mask. So the point of the metaphor is to get people to reject the metaphor, okay, I can see that. It's really wrong that other people get to decide someone is a mouse. But the only way to see the power of it is to see how there's a big difference between wearing masks (that you make and choose and put on and take off) and being. To say they're all people in mouse masks ignores the actual point. The place where the wrongness lives. Wearing masks is about choice. And there's one level where having bad consequences for one set of masks is a big wrong, yes. But being stuck in the shape someone perceives for you, that's a wrongness. So the mouse people in the book are actual mice, who sometimes wear masks... and it's wrong to see people as mice. And the reader is seeing them as mice, which makes the reader complicit in the wrong labelling and positions them really uncomfortably. It's just as wrong to see the cats as cats. It's not just the way they're seeing each other that's wrong, its the way we the readers are seeing all of them. And the way they're mice not just in the flashbacks to the war but also in the 'present' where the story is being written down, that's part of that. This tendency to see Others in these terms, it didn't get left behind there. We're still doing it. Right now. Looking at that page. So we reject the metaphor, we reject the tendency, in ourselves, now.
I maybe get carried away. Maybe that wasn't meant. But if you go, oh, it's just a metaphor, they're just wearing masks, we're meant to ignore that, moving on... is missing the point.
So it seems like a lot of this stuff thinks it's a very clever way of telling a story as long as you ignore the bits that make it Maus.
So I'm a bit fed up of it.
The other crit about diaspora and the tension between the narrative of a homeland and the experience of the now place, that I don't have an argue with. But I'm left to wonder if that's because I'm reading about other people telling stories about themselves that I just don't know the backgrounds to, or if its other people telling stories about other other people, or what. Would I argue if I knew more? *big shrug*
The furthest my family has moved in an age is bouncing around East Anglia. Hard to long for imagined homelands that are a viable commute from here. Can maybe understand the nostalgia bit, the story of how it was in the past compared to now. The ways it is and isn't a different place than it was, or than the story tells it was.
... that gets uncomfortable though, when I try and think about stories about the way things used to be what springs to mind is random people complaining about the Portugese / Polish / Asians that you didn't used to get around here.
I think I'm not really equipped to grok the diaspora stuff.
I am sort of trying to apply it to science fiction thinking though. I mean, if I'm writing about how humans leave Earth and go out to places so far away there is no getting home, or how Earth doesn't even exist any more, then diaspora is the relevant concept.
Tricky.
Starting from the idea of an imaginary home, though, I start thinking about Star Trek. Lots of people have in common these stories of this far place, very different from where we actually live. Goes with shared customs and identifications. Does not have the same kind of real world risk/reward at all. Trivialises. But, imaginary communities based around shared understanding of the place we never can go.
*ponders*
... when I can only understand any and everything by way of F&SF, probably TV series, then I start thinking, maybe I should get a bit more invested in the real world.
... the real world blows up a lot more permanently. :-(
But it irritates me disproportionately when the crit about Maus does two things: it goes on about how it's not like other comics, and it goes on about how it's not really about mice. It's like, this one is the good comic, this one is the valuable comic, it's not using any of those stupid comic tricks, in fact lets not even call it a comic! It's way better than all those others! And yet quite often you get the feeling they haven't studied many of them others, and may in fact be forming their opinions based on an inferior issue of Superman. Comics are not exactly short on visual tricks and metaphorical layers. Especially if you steer away from the equivalent of the summer blockbusters.
And then there's the thing about the mice. Apparently Spiegelman says that he drew them as mice and cats and all because then you would look at it all and think that's wrong, they shouldn't be animals, they're all people. The quote is in one of the six long things I just read, sorry. And, okay, that's an interesting approach. Use an extended metaphor to get people to be really fed up with that metaphor. But the crit keeps saying about how they're not mice, they're people in mouse masks. And that's plain wrong. Within the art, there's three different ways of drawing people: There's the usual ones where they are mice and cats and pigs and stuff, there's the ones where the mice are pretending to be pigs so they are drawn as mice in pig masks, and there's the bit in the middle where the little artist picture at an artist studio drawing is saying how hard it all is to draw, and in that bit there are humans with human ears and they are wearing masks of mice and pigs and cats and dogs and everything. The artist with human ears in a mouse mask tied on with string sort of shrinks down into being drawn as a mouse with no mask lines or string lines or spare ears. So there's a distinct difference between the two, the transition is shown as significant. When the crit is saying actually they're not mice they're people, that's not engaging with the text, that's tossing out the metaphor. It's not trying to see what it actually does. They aren't people wearing mouse masks, so why aren't they? Why is it important when the artist is in a mask and when he's being mouse shaped again? Crit doesn't care, these big long essays don't care, because secretly everyone is humans anyway. :-p to that, look at the actual pictures! Ignore what the author says unless he says it on the page.
On the page it says he gets shrunk into mouseness. So it's something about loss and trapping and restriction, to be a mouse, not a human in a mask. It's something about being perceived not as having this attribute you can put on and take off, but as being in essence, essentially, for real this other kind of thing. Perception by others or by self? Big complicated. But there's a bit where a mouse is telling everyone he's a cat, and the narrator level has Art asking his father if the guy was really a mouse person or a cat person, and he says something like, who knows, to the Germans he was a Jew. (the book is in a bag somewhere. One of two bags. Neither of which I can reach from here. Is bad quoting practice.) But the thing is, the guy is drawn as a mouse person, and as a cat person, but neither way is he drawn as wearing a mask. When the Jews are mice pretending to be Polish pig people they wear a pig mask. If he was a mouse person wearing a cat mask then he would be pretending, or indeed if he was a cat wearing a mouse mask, even if someone else put it on him, which would be easy to draw. But he isn't drawn that way, he's either a mouse person or a cat person, no masks. And he's mostly drawn mouse. Because he's perceived that way. It isn't a mask he can take off. Whichever he is, he just is... but he doesn't get to choose which one he is. Social perception and labelling by the powerful call him a mouse, so a mouse he is stuck as. That's not a mask. So the point of the metaphor is to get people to reject the metaphor, okay, I can see that. It's really wrong that other people get to decide someone is a mouse. But the only way to see the power of it is to see how there's a big difference between wearing masks (that you make and choose and put on and take off) and being. To say they're all people in mouse masks ignores the actual point. The place where the wrongness lives. Wearing masks is about choice. And there's one level where having bad consequences for one set of masks is a big wrong, yes. But being stuck in the shape someone perceives for you, that's a wrongness. So the mouse people in the book are actual mice, who sometimes wear masks... and it's wrong to see people as mice. And the reader is seeing them as mice, which makes the reader complicit in the wrong labelling and positions them really uncomfortably. It's just as wrong to see the cats as cats. It's not just the way they're seeing each other that's wrong, its the way we the readers are seeing all of them. And the way they're mice not just in the flashbacks to the war but also in the 'present' where the story is being written down, that's part of that. This tendency to see Others in these terms, it didn't get left behind there. We're still doing it. Right now. Looking at that page. So we reject the metaphor, we reject the tendency, in ourselves, now.
I maybe get carried away. Maybe that wasn't meant. But if you go, oh, it's just a metaphor, they're just wearing masks, we're meant to ignore that, moving on... is missing the point.
So it seems like a lot of this stuff thinks it's a very clever way of telling a story as long as you ignore the bits that make it Maus.
So I'm a bit fed up of it.
The other crit about diaspora and the tension between the narrative of a homeland and the experience of the now place, that I don't have an argue with. But I'm left to wonder if that's because I'm reading about other people telling stories about themselves that I just don't know the backgrounds to, or if its other people telling stories about other other people, or what. Would I argue if I knew more? *big shrug*
The furthest my family has moved in an age is bouncing around East Anglia. Hard to long for imagined homelands that are a viable commute from here. Can maybe understand the nostalgia bit, the story of how it was in the past compared to now. The ways it is and isn't a different place than it was, or than the story tells it was.
... that gets uncomfortable though, when I try and think about stories about the way things used to be what springs to mind is random people complaining about the Portugese / Polish / Asians that you didn't used to get around here.
I think I'm not really equipped to grok the diaspora stuff.
I am sort of trying to apply it to science fiction thinking though. I mean, if I'm writing about how humans leave Earth and go out to places so far away there is no getting home, or how Earth doesn't even exist any more, then diaspora is the relevant concept.
Tricky.
Starting from the idea of an imaginary home, though, I start thinking about Star Trek. Lots of people have in common these stories of this far place, very different from where we actually live. Goes with shared customs and identifications. Does not have the same kind of real world risk/reward at all. Trivialises. But, imaginary communities based around shared understanding of the place we never can go.
*ponders*
... when I can only understand any and everything by way of F&SF, probably TV series, then I start thinking, maybe I should get a bit more invested in the real world.
... the real world blows up a lot more permanently. :-(
no subject
Date: 2011-10-13 04:33 pm (UTC)Back when surrealism was about dredging the subconscious to bring out the Ur-Art, one of the complaints against it was that it objectified women. Not all that surprising, considering what's likely to be upper-most in the subconscious of men in a sexually repressed society. But when I look at Magritt's work, I see not only sexual objectification but that sometimes the objectification is the point -- it's what the work's commenting on (Like in his "The Lovers", any version).
Back to Maus -- maybe part of the author's point (a point the crit you've referenced would be missing by ignoring the metaphor, yeah) is showing up the human tendency toward othering, even in the readers? That we're supposed to be initially complicit in and later uncomfortable with the mice-are-mice and cats-are-cats? And/or the present-day mouseness was intended to show the long-term effects of such othering. Of course, it's possible the author's later defense was just tacked on to answer criticism of him depicting people as animals.
But I think that both objectification and othering are inherent and necessary tools of the human mind -- horribly mis- and over-used, yes, but not bad in and of themselves.
~