I read Maus in graduate school. I’m pretty sure it was the first graphic novel I ever read. I wasn’t a comic book kid – pretty much my sense of the form was the Sunday comics that came with my parents’ Chicago Tribune subscription and the The Far Side. I was vaguely aware that there was a new form out there called “the graphic novel” and that this was a leading light, but I was unprepared for what unfolded as I read. Like Toni Morrison or Roland Barthes, it hit a place not many readings could do: it was talking about “the power of historical memory” or “representing the unrepresentable” or whatever such graduate school themes that are real and important but can’t help but suffer once we name them this way, but it was also compulsively readable and resonated in ways I would have then been embarassed to describe as “personal.” For weeks I imagined mouse faces on people I saw, the thin curves of those haunted faces. As a graduate student spending my share in a crappy apartments, who still thought that only crappy apartments had mice in them, I remember thinking a lot about that choice of making us mice in his book. I imagined that as with Philip Roth, the Serious Jews might have a thing or two to say about that, about the irreverence with which he approached this subject. Without knowing much about the history of comics I knew Spieglman came from the underground scene, and the irreverance of the whole thing was what held me. For some reason, one of the things I remember most from that first reading, over twenty years ago now, was when the narrator is describing his father doing something really cheap – I think saving old cereal boxes – and stops himself. Can I say this? Can I talk about my Dad being a cheap Jew? It’s like when you read Portnoy and think, wait you can actually write about that? People who are tragic but also small and petty and neurotic in comic ways – can you actually make the joke? As a veteran of Sunday school Holocaust lessons, the most subersive thing about the book was that matter of factness with which it showed that survivors, as we’d been taught to call them without a modifier, were not necessarily saints. And not just in the dark sexy way people like to talk about “complicated” people. Sometimes they were just a pain in the ass. To those to whom evil is done, do evil in return – but sometimes they just hoard rubber bands, and there’s something in that worth recording, even next to all the rest of it. 

Maybe it was just because I read it in the late nineties, when everyone was talking about “metafiction” but the thing I remember most is how often there are moments like this, especially in the second volume as he recounts how the writing took over his life, how he doesn’t want anyone to make it a movie, how he’s not sure what was accomplished by the whole enterprise. The panel I think about more than any is one where he quotes Beckett to his shrink, about how words are an affront to the unnammable. Then there’s  a panel where both he and the shrink are silent. Then, he says, “on the other hand, Beckett did say it.”  In the current discussions about the book since some terrible and/or stupid people did what terrible and/or stupid people do, I’ve seen a lot about how it’s an important book because there are no heroic non-Jews who come in and save the day, it’s just destruction and what you live with. And that’s true of course. But it seems to me the more important thing about the book is its ideosyncratic and irreverant nature – the choice of animals as away around the pornographic representation of extreme human suffering, but also the willingness to interrogate his own storytelling and consider the ends it might serve. “Reading and writing aren’t sacred,” Adrienne Rich once wrote, “but people have died as if they were.” Spieglman is too smart, too ruthless an observor, too perceptive of folly to believe that books can save us, and that he writes and draws even though he knows this is part of what makes his creation so valuable.