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Popular Culture Review
fantasy and fiction, Maus is a factual account of both his and his father’s story
and thus broadens our definition of what counts as a medium through wliich
authentic stories can be recounted. Thus, the comic and documentary aspects of
Spiegelman’s text are not pitted against each other but rather work in tandem.
Chi the other hand, it is also a way for Maus to break through the cacophony and
commercialization of Holocaust representations. This is itself ironic given that
the comic book form is an essential feature of commercialization.
Spiegelman’s concern with Holocaust commercialization is most
explicit in Book Two which ironically appropriates Nazi propaganda to evoke
the symbol of commercialization—Mickey Mouse. “Mickey Mouse is the most
miserable ideal ever revealed,” reads the epigraph. “Healthy emotions tell every
independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filthcovered verm in. . . caimot be the ideal type of animal.. . . Away with Jewish
brutalization of the people!” Although the Jews were accused of brutalizing “the
people” by idealizing Mickey Mouse, one of the central ironies of the Holocaust
is that the Nazis justified their brutality by reducing the Jews to vermin. One of
Spiegelman’s concerns with commercialization is tiiat it renders a similar effect
to Nazi propaganda. That is, Nazi propaganda reduces Jews to nonhumans,
thereby making their extermination possible. Similarly, commercialization
reduces the Holocaust to a form of entertainment.
What might it mean for a book on the Holocaust to open with a
reference to commercialization? LaCapra insightfully observes that “if one were
tempted to object that Spiegelman himself does in a sense figure Auschvsdtz (or
Mauschwitz) as Mickey-Mouse land. . . it would be equally important to note
that his more challenging move is to bring Auschwitz to Mickey-Mouse land,
that is, to bring the Holocaust past to the America that must have seemed to
survivors like a Disneyworld in its distance from their experience” (160). Thus,
by inhabiting the comic form popularized by Walt Disney, Spiegelman is,
according to LaCapra, able to convey in America’s own language, as it were, the
horrors of the Holocaust. There is, however, another dimension to Spiegelman’s
evocation of Mickey Mouse. Sitting at his drawing table toward the middle of
Book Two, Spiegelman imagines himself confronted by the paparazzi and
entrepreneurs after the book’s success. “Artie, baby,” the entrepreneur says.
“Check out this licensing deal. You get 50% of the profits. We’ll make a
million.” He holds up a poster to Spiegelman that proclaims: “MAUS: You’ve
read the book. Now Buy the Vest!” (2:42). As this moment of self-reflexive
irony suggests, one of the great questions that mobilizes Maus is whether it is
still possible to tell stories of the Holocaust, given the commercialization that
attends it. Mauschwitz, however, as LaCapra makes clear, is no Disneyland, and
the moments that act as sudden eruptions of reality for the reader are often more
effective than—and break through the complacency that can result from—^the
many visual and written texts that are supposedly more “true.” By making the
writing process part of the representation and part of the reality that intrudes into