The Real Meaning of Spiegelman's Maus

 

Maus and Maus II are not about the Holocaust. This is a good example of how most people miss the point of creative writing as of parables. John Lewis and his publishers sought to cash in on Maus, and did, with a cheap imitation, March and March II, giving Lewis’s personal account of the civil rights movement. But it was missing the essence of Maus. They had no idea.

Maus is a character study of Vladek Spiegelman.

Anything we hear 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 the Holocaust. He is resistant to talking about it. He would rather talk about his romantic conquests. And he burns his wife’s painstaking accounts of it. This is not the action of a truth-teller.

Vladek is a peculiar character. Most obviously, he is parsimonious to a comic extent. One might imagine this came from his experience in the camps.

But he is not consistently parsimonious. He scolds his second wife, Mala, for using a wire coat hanger, the parsimonious choice, instead of a wooden one, to hang up his son’s coat.

Then he secretly throws his son’s coat in the garbage. Hardly parsimonious.

Granted, in the first instance, it is his son’s loss, not his own. But then he must give his son his own old coat.

The real motive behind his parsimony is not to save money or conserve; it is to keep those around him constantly on edge, and subject to criticism whatever they do. If not being parsimonious works better every now and then, parsimony must be sacrificed to the higher objective. The point was to give Mala or Art that acid feeling in the pit of their stomach, and to delight in awareness that he is making them feel bad.

Spiegelman’s Vladek is a perceptive portrait of just what someone who has given in to the vice of pride, aka hubris, aka narcissism, is like. Vladek is the type of Hitler; and a study of the type.

One characteristic of the narcissist or vice-bound is a comically two-dimensional predictability. They form the humours of the comic stage. Narcissists act like NPCs. Vladek’s general frugality is of that order.

Vladek appears first in the tale to warn his son as a child that there is no such thing as a friend. Hitler’s starting point in Mein Kampf: it is the natural Darwinian order 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 is them against the world.

Moving to the present, Artie goes to visit his father, and his father’s first two sentences 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 will find reason to complain.

And he is the same with second wife Mala, complaining about the wooden hanger. Or the chicken is too dry.

The hanger complaint has a second function: it is meant to sow division between mother and child. The narcissist will always foment conflict within the family. It is a control thing.

When Artie asks Vladek to “start with Mom. Tell me how you met,” Vladek tells him instead about how all the women chased him, and he had another girlfriend who desperately wanted to marry him and was better looking than Artie’s mother. Anja, Artie’s mother, 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 not the way a father should talk about his child’s mother. Again, he is sowing division within the family.

He then obliquely criticizes Anja as a communist, who betrayed a friend to a three-month prison term. It might be true; but even if so why tell it unprompted? The point of this story seem to be to belittle the other parent in the eyes of the child.

Artie catches his father then in a lie at least of omission—a warning to us as audience that he is an unreliable narrator.  Doing the math, Artie realizes that Anja, his mother, must have already been pregnant when they married. This raises the possibility that it was a forced marriage; his father may have been playing around, heedless of the women’s interests, and gotten caught.

Those who give in to the sin of pride are also likely to give in to the sin of lust. As well as that of avarice, and so forth.

Caught out on this, Vladek tried to distract by throwing shade on Artie. He accuses him of being premature: this looks like an ad hoc projection, not a truth. Then he claims the doctor had to break his arm to extract him, and that, as a child, that he often raised his arm in a “Heil Hitler” salute.

This does not sound plausible. Does a diffuclut birth ever require the breaking of an arm? Does the breaking of an arm ever cause involuntary movements for months or years after? Narcissists when caught out can say almost anything. They can seem to be momentarily delusional, as M. Scott Peck has observed.

That Vladek is rattled at this moment is demonstrated by his spilling all the pills he has been counting carefully.

He credits himself with bringing Anja back from post-partum depression with his gentle and loving care for her in a Czechoslovakia sanitarium.

Does this sound like the Vladek we can ourselves observe?

More likely, seeing how he behaves with his second wife and his son, he drove Anja to the nervous breakdown. Then, rather than let her escape his grip, and possibly have pleasant experiences without him, he grabbed the opportunity to go with her to the posh sanitarium instead of tending to his work. As a result, by his own account, he never got his new factory insured; it was robbed, and they lost everything.

It is surely actually unusual for sanitarium patients to be accompanied by “Someone they trust.” Few can afford such a thing; and it is surely considered bad for their recovery. The idea of the sanatoriums was to get away from their daily life, which is apparently troubling them, not to bring some of it with them.

He tells about the factory being robbed, presumably, because he thinks it reflects badly on Anja. Look at the trouble her mental illness caused! Look at how I suffered because of her!

And though he probably believes it himself—narcissists are expert at self-delusion-- “I did 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 him while he was away. He was simply irresponsible; too irresponsible to think of such things. And, as narcissists always do, he finds a scapegoat.

There is much more, but this post is eating up too much time. I may continue later.

But the predictable effect of having a hubristic spouse or parent is, of course, to drive the rest of the family, especially his designated scapegoats, into depression. In Vladek’s case, his first wife commits suicide, soon after his son is released from a psychiatric hospital.

And, of course, he blames his son to all the relatives for this; while his son blames his mother for this. For whatever perverse psychological reason, nobody ever dares blame the narcissist. That feels too dangerous.

On top of it 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 again the 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 on them, he will be venting his sorrow. It amounts to the same thing: the emotions of the narcissist become the family’s problem. It is up to them to do something about it.

This is the root of all “depression” and much, perhaps most “mental illness”: victimization by a narcissist in the family.

Maus lays it out plainly, and most people refuse to see it.