The Real Meaning of Spiegelman's Maus
Maus andMaus II are not about the Holocaust. This is a good example of how most peoplemiss the point of creative writing as of parables. John Lewis and hispublishers sought to cash in on Maus, and did, with a cheap imitation, Marchand March II, giving Lewis’s personal account of the civil rights movement. Butit was missing the essence of Maus. They had no idea.
Maus is acharacter study of Vladek Spiegelman.
Anything wehear about the Holocaust is entirely through his eyes. And he is not driven,like Elie Wiesel in Night, by a sense of mission to tell us about theHolocaust. He is resistant to talking about it. He would rather talk about his romanticconquests. And he burns his wife’s painstaking accounts of it. This is not theaction of a truth-teller.
Vladek is apeculiar character. Most obviously, he is parsimonious to a comic extent. Onemight imagine this came from his experience in the camps.
But he isnot consistently parsimonious. He scolds his second wife, Mala, for using awire coat hanger, the parsimonious choice, instead of a wooden one, to hang uphis son’s coat.
Then he secretlythrows his son’s coat in the garbage. Hardly parsimonious.
Granted, inthe first instance, it is his son’s loss, not his own. But then he must givehis son his own old coat.
The realmotive behind his parsimony is not to save money or conserve; it is to keepthose around him constantly on edge, and subject to criticism whatever they do.If not being parsimonious works better every now and then, parsimony must besacrificed to the higher objective. The point was to give Mala or Art that acidfeeling in the pit of their stomach, and to delight in awareness that he ismaking them feel bad.
Spiegelman’sVladek is a perceptive portrait of just what someone who has given in to thevice of pride, aka hubris, aka narcissism, is like. Vladek is the type ofHitler; and a study of the type.
Onecharacteristic of the narcissist or vice-bound is a comically two-dimensionalpredictability. They form the humours of the comic stage. Narcissists act like NPCs.Vladek’s general frugality is of that order.
Vladek appearsfirst in the tale to warn his son as a child that there is no such thing as afriend. Hitler’s starting point in Mein Kampf: it is the natural Darwinianorder that everyone just looks out for themselves. For individuals and for races,it is survival of the fittest. And this is the creed of the narcissist: it isthem against the world.
Moving tothe present, Artie goes to visit his father, and his father’s first twosentences on seeing him after two years are complaints: first, that he is late,and second, that he did not being his wife. Whatever Artie does, Vladek willfind reason to complain.
And he isthe same with second wife Mala, complaining about the wooden hanger. Or thechicken is too dry.
The hangercomplaint has a second function: it is meant to sow division between mother andchild. The narcissist will always foment conflict within the family. It is acontrol thing.
When Artieasks Vladek to “start with Mom. Tell me how you met,” Vladek tells him instead abouthow all the women chased him, and he had another girlfriend who desperatelywanted to marry him and was better looking than Artie’s mother. Anja, Artie’smother, was nothing to look at, and supposedly had a nervous disorder. She was,as far as he is concerned, lucky to have him.
This is notthe way a father should talk about his child’s mother. Again, he is sowingdivision within the family.
He then obliquelycriticizes Anja as a communist, who betrayed a friend to a three-month prisonterm. It might be true; but even if so why tell it unprompted? The point ofthis story seem to be to belittle the other parent in the eyes of the child.
Artiecatches his father then in a lie at least of omission—a warning to us asaudience that he is an unreliable narrator. Doing the math, Artie realizes that Anja, his mother, must have alreadybeen pregnant when they married. This raises the possibility that it was aforced marriage; his father may have been playing around, heedless of the women’sinterests, and gotten caught.
Those whogive in to the sin of pride are also likely to give in to the sin of lust. Aswell as that of avarice, and so forth.
Caught outon this, Vladek tried to distract by throwing shade on Artie. He accuses him ofbeing premature: this looks like an ad hoc projection, not a truth. Then heclaims the doctor had to break his arm to extract him, and that, as a child, thathe often raised his arm in a “Heil Hitler” salute.
This doesnot sound plausible. Does a diffuclut birth ever require the breaking of anarm? Does the breaking of an arm ever cause involuntary movements for months oryears after? Narcissists when caught out can say almost anything. They can seemto be momentarily delusional, as M. Scott Peck has observed.
That Vladekis rattled at this moment is demonstrated by his spilling all the pills he hasbeen counting carefully.
He creditshimself with bringing Anja back from post-partum depression with his gentle andloving care for her in a Czechoslovakia sanitarium.
Does thissound like the Vladek we can ourselves observe?
Morelikely, seeing how he behaves with his second wife and his son, he drove Anjato the nervous breakdown. Then, rather than let her escape his grip, andpossibly have pleasant experiences without him, he grabbed the opportunity to gowith her to the posh sanitarium instead of tending to his work. As a result, byhis own account, he never got his new factory insured; it was robbed, and theylost everything.
It is surelyactually unusual for sanitarium patients to be accompanied by “Someone theytrust.” Few can afford such a thing; and it is surely considered bad for theirrecovery. The idea of the sanatoriums was to get away from their daily life, whichis apparently troubling them, not to bring some of it with them.
He tellsabout the factory being robbed, presumably, because he thinks it reflects badlyon Anja. Look at the trouble her mental illness caused! Look at how I sufferedbecause of her!
And thoughhe probably believes it himself—narcissists are expert at self-delusion-- “Idid not have time to have it insured before we left” does not sound plausible.Had time been the issue, he could have had his father-in-law insure it for himwhile he was away. He was simply irresponsible; too irresponsible to think ofsuch things. And, as narcissists always do, he finds a scapegoat.
There ismuch more, but this post is eating up too much time. I may continue later.
But the predictableeffect of having a hubristic spouse or parent is, of course, to drive the restof the family, especially his designated scapegoats, into depression. In Vladek’scase, his first wife commits suicide, soon after his son is released from apsychiatric hospital.
And, of course,he blames his son to all the relatives for this; while his son blames hismother for this. For whatever perverse psychological reason, nobody ever dares blamethe narcissist. That feels too dangerous.
On top ofit all, his mother having just committed suicide, and his father blaming him,Artie at twenty is also expected to console his father, who makes himself againthe centre of attention with his dramatic expressions of grief.
The narcissist,when distraught, must take it out on his scapegoat. If not venting his anger onthem, he will be venting his sorrow. It amounts to the same thing: the emotionsof the narcissist become the family’s problem. It is up to them to do somethingabout it.
This is theroot of all “depression” and much, perhaps most “mental illness”: victimizationby a narcissist in the family.
Maus laysit out plainly, and most people refuse to see it.
