ReReadings: Ellen Miller on MAUS

By Ellen Miller

“I tend to be easily unhinged,” Art Spiegelman writes, introducing his new book, In the Shadow of No Towers, about his response to the fires engulfing Lower Manhattan, his spiritual and geographic home, on 9/11, fires leading to more fires, which today threaten to engulf the world.

I’d decided to reread MAUS, Spiegelman’s tour de force graphic novel about his father’s survival of Auschwitz and about Artie’s awesomely, unmanageably complicated struggle to survive being Vladek’s son, months before No Towers was published. But rereading MAUS without attending to No Towers’ pivotal image – the glowing, emptied skeletal structure of the North Tower before its collapse, the burned bodies inside searingly implied — is impossible now.

In my rereading, MAUS’s concern with the Shoah seems secondary. Its true subject is the child’s experience of parental imprint and the failure or incapacity of the powerful, authoritative, responsible adult to steward adequately the fragile, small, dependent. MAUS examines, pitilessly and compassionately: traits and mechanisms by which parents pass on their pain to their children; parents who, despite good intentions, and suffering their own injuries, cannot love; children who love their parents because not loving them means not-survival; sons who love their fathers because they don’t know how not to.

MAUS insists that survivors’ lives are greater, more complex than their accumulated traumas. No one’s let off the hook in Spiegelman’s moral universe. This is the best, perhaps the only, moral vision with which writing can approach family: with empathy, rigorous attempts at accuracy, and a democracy of indictment: If everyone’s vulnerable, everyone’s accountable.

The suicide of Anja, Art’s mother, presents a moment begging for the facile, explanatory model of experience: Hitler made her do it! Spiegelman, brilliantly, courageously, doesn't permit us — or Anja — this easy out: The young, privileged Anja takes pills for “nerves,” considers suicide, enters a swanky Swiss sanitarium – all years before Auschwitz.

Where personality ends and consequences of historical devastation begin is unknowable — and utterly irrelevant to children, powerless beings who have no say in being placed here on earth. The elders’ assignment is protecting and nurturing the young, regardless of what’s come before the latter’s unbidden lives. Of Vladek the man, we can say, truthfully, “He did the best he could do.” Of Vladek the father, we can say, truthfully, “The best he could do was subadequate.”

I was struck, hard, to learn of the post-Holocaust addition of another commandment to the Torah’s 613. The 614th commandment contains injunctions to remember Auschwitz, to refuse handing posthumous victories to Hitler, but its distillation is: Thou Shalt Survive.

Big History apparently necessitated the Torah’s 614th decree. Meanwhile, I’m awaiting the addition of an eleventh commandment: Honor Thy Children.