Columns:: Worth Repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::April 29, 2002

Worth repeating

Erin McGlothlin of Washington University, St. Louis, delivered a lecture for the department of Germanic and Slavic languages April 19 dealing with the portrayal of time in Maus, the “comic book” novels about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman. Some excerpts:
“Indeed, the comic book format of the scene, with its easily differentiated depiction of two separate temporal levels and two physical manifestations of the same character--young versus old--appears to clarify the disparity between the past and the present and to provide the two temporalities with a distinct image in a much more visceral way than verbal narration itself. For a novel about both the Holocaust past of the survivor and his present-day relationship with his son, Maus’s use of visual images as a supplement to narration seems an ideal method for clearly demarcating the differences between Holocaust experiences and the contemporary life of the survivor and his son.
“A second look . . , however, belies this easy assumption about the use of visual media to distinguish between past and present. The comic images of Maus, rather than clearly marking off the past from the present, contribute to a novel in which the present and the past are intimately interconnected and difficult to separate from one another. The past is revealed as constituitive of the present, and the present makes demands of the way in which the past is represented. . . .”

--Beth Roberts

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