What?

            In class, we discussed the unusual word order of the father mouse, Vladek’s, speech in the present-day time stream in Maus, as Vladek remembers the Holocaust.  We suggested that the broken patterns of normal speech represent how Vladek is broken by the Holocaust, as his speech is only awkward in the present (after the horrific events he went through), not in the past events he speaks of (before he was “broken”).  I stretched things a little (or a lot, knowing that Art Spiegelman probably never considered this as he wrote) when I pointed out that the inversion of words is reminiscent of the word order used in communications of the deaf, perhaps symbolizing how people are often deaf to what Vladek and Spiegelman are trying to say.

            One key wording motif, the significance of which escaped me until recently, is Vladek’s persistent use of the word “what” in situations where normal English speakers would never think to place it.  For example, on page 62 of My Father Bleeds History, Vladek narrates “And thought all night different things what could happen to us” (Spiegelman 62).  I suggest that the continuous appearance of “what” in surprising places is meant to stand out to the reader as representing, on a very simplified level, Vladek’s reaction to all he’s lived through: “What?”

            I remember at the start of Toni Morrison’s book The Bluest Eye, which we read last semester, she explains how since Claudia finds the “why” too difficult to contemplate, “one must take refuge in how” (Morrison).  Toni Morrison is, to use a favorite word from our class dialect, “deep” – she makes the “how” seem deeper than many of the “whys” I’ve previously considered.  While Spiegelman doesn’t explicitly issue a statement about the levels of what, how, and why, he makes a point similar to Morrison’s about how living during a terrible event can leave a person struggling to grasp the more basic levels.  Spiegelman leaves the how and why up to his readers, and focuses on presenting the what, forming a basis of fundamental understanding that he hopes will lead to greater understanding.

            One other symbolic topic – while I was packing up after class to leave for sixth hour, one of my friends (obsessed with combat, wars, and weaponry) came in and saw the comic book Maus still on my desk.  He told me that Maus is the name of a German supertank – a fact that I doubt someone writing about the Holocaust and World War II wouldn’t know.  I think Art Spiegelman may have named his book as he did to represent how he wanted it to be a metaphoric super-weapon: to protect his people, to break through the walls of ignorance in peoples’ minds, and to be something that people must notice (I don’t have a supertank on hand, but I assume they’re hard to miss).