Maus as Interpreted by Burke and Wordsworth

Burke, Wordsworth, and Maus

Maus, by Art Spiegelman, is a graphic novel about the author’s relationship with his father.   The relationship unfolds as the father describes his personal and horrific accounts of Jewish persecution and his experiences in the German concentration camps of World War II.     William Woodsworth wrote that a poet should be considered a translator that finds the exquisite language to express the emulated feelings of an action against the real passion of the action (567).   The material in Maus is emotionally charged, if not overwhelming.  However, Edmund Burk’s, Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, can be used to illustrate Spiegelman’s use of pain, pleasure, and the sublime to find that exquisite language that moves the reader closer to the real life experiences of the father.

Burke writes that terror is the strongest emotion of the mind and that anything analogous to terror is a source of the sublime (459).  He writes that when pain or death presses us to closely, we are unable to experience delight (459).  Delight being the emotion we feel after the removal of imminent death or excruciating pain (457).  Burke states we can feel delight: “…but at certain distances, and with certain modification…” (459).  

The lessons of Maus develop through the sublime and relentless grief.   Spiegleman distances us from the terror in three ways.   First, animals represent political divisions and become a physical modifier of human likeness.   The Nazis are represented as cats and the Jews are represented as mice.   Second, there is a chronological distance as the accounts are years after the events and we have knowledge of the father’s survival.  Third is through inflection of the father’s style of story telling.  His delivery is rather factual, but the reader’s emotions evolve through the descriptions.

Burke describes grief as the removal of an object that is totally lost and never to be enjoyed again (457).  A powerful interpretation occurs when the father describes the public hanging of several business associates within the presence of their families.  Burke states that: “It is the nature of grief to keep its object perpetually in its eye…” (458).   As the father recounts the story, he says: “Ach, when I think now of them, it still makes me cry. Look – Even from my dead eye tears are coming out” (Maus 84).  The dead eye is his glass eye.   Though probably coincidental, the use of the eye in this poetic statement, with Burke’s interpretation of grief, is powerful, moving, and thought provoking.  The interpretation is furthered, as this is the first emotional expression of the father.

Spiegelman uses chronological overlaps to evoke Burke’s description of the sublime.  The father recounts deportations to Auschwitz and fears for his family safety.  The father and two other families make arrangements to have their children moved to safety.  The scene shows the parents, portrayed as mice, looking through a fence and the father narrating: “We watched until they disappeared from our eyes.  It was the last time ever we saw them, but that we couldn’t know” (Maus 108).  The mice in the scene aren’t experiencing terror because they don’t know the fate of their children.  However, it is made clear to the reader and the thought of losing a child would fit the definition of pain or death pressing too closely to us.   Burke would classify the physical death of a child as grief and the perception of losing a child, which is effectively transferred to the reader, as terror.

Finishing the book removes the reader from the immersion of relentless pain and suffering.  A sense of the relief, indicative of the sublime, is at work for the reader and it is this sense that lends credibility to the success of Maus.  The sublime emotionally moves us closer to the events that occurred and to the experiences of the father.  Through the interpretation of Burke, we are better able to understand the emotional forces at work in Maus and he helps us frame the larger success of Spiegelman’s work by demonstrating Wordsworth’s criteria of a good poet. 

Works Cited

Burke, Edmond.  Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.  The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al.  2^nd ed. New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 2010. 450-460. Print.

Spiegelman, Art.  Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York. Random House, Inc. 1986. Print.

Wordsworth, William.  Preface to Lyrical Ballads.  The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al.  2^nd ed. New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 2010. 556-579. Print.