Narrative in Graphics: Maus II

Read this first! Please click to enlarge.

The assignment for this week's post was to choose a graphic format, whether a comic, graphic novel, or cartoon and choose 6-10 frames that tell a story. I'm not sure if anyone recognizes the above, but this graphic novel, called Maus II by Art Spiegelman (he has drawn several covers for The New Yorker through the years) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Maus I & Maus II are separate volumes depicting the Holocaust using mice as Jews, cats as Nazis, and other animals for various other "races". The Wall Street Journal called Maus II "[t]he most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust" (emphasis added). Think about that! A graphic novel depiction to rival Spielberg's "Schindler's List".

It's safe to say that everyone knows the general story of the Holocaust, most famously, perhaps, the horrors at Auschwitz, so maybe my choice was easy because anyone reading the above already has the gist. I like that this particular page gives insight into the narrator of the novel: from the first panel we know we have a first person perspective of a prisoner. By panel 3 you can see that we've got two time frames, the past of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and the present with our narrator, now an older guy (mouse) telling his story in broken English to a younger guy many years after the war (glasses on the older guy illustrates that some time has passed). This particular page describes not only that he suffered by laboring for very little food and minimal pleasures, but also that he starved and worked for weeks or even months to save up (the second panel illustrating the "currency" and exchange rate) so that he could arrange for Anja to be near him while they were both prisoners in Auschwitz (for some context, Anja was his wife - but from these panels alone you could deduce that it was a female he deeply cared for - could have been a friend, daughter, sister, lover - doesn't really matter).

I could have chosen from many of the pages in either Maus I or Maus II, but this particular one packs a lot of the overarching narrative structure into very little space with few words and it stands alone with explanation from the previous and subsequent frames. We have the two main characters, with mention of a third important character, Anja, a date (October 1944), the location (Auschwitz), and the general idea is that we're reading the first person story of the Holocaust as told by someone who survived to tell it.

[Aside: Perhaps this is more explanation than necessary, since you can see the panels for yourself, but if you can't tell, I'm a huge fan of Art Spiegelman (incidentally, this is his father's story, and he is the younger mouse in the frame interviewing his father so that he can write a comic about his Holocaust experience - very meta of him...). He is a narrative genius, and I knew immediately that this is what I wanted to share for this week's assignment.]

At first I didn't really understand how this assignment fit into a course on international arbitration, or how it would improve my own narrative style. However, now I can see that it's a perfect illustration of framing. Imagine a novel you've read that's been adapted for the screen. Many people criticize how a beloved novel has been changed because the film is limited to using only visuals and dialog to demonstrate what was so elaborately described using text only. On the other hand, a film adaptation can do a lot with very few words, using specifically placed dialog, body language, facial expressions and pure action without a voice-over narrator to tell you what's happening - you just experience it for yourself. A graphic novel is akin to a film in that it can use only visuals to tell the story with some dialog in speech bubbles, or there can be an extra narrative element, like Spiegelman has done, in which the illustrator can use visuals combined with a true narrator (here we have one level of narration by the older mouse to the younger one, and a second level of narration as told by Spiegelman himself, the artist of the novel/other mouse in the frames who is relaying the story to us, the reader audience).

With our oral arguments, we have to take real life action and put it into words which will explain the parties' motives, the background, and the general "gist" of the interaction to an audience, the tribunal. It really is a hard thing to do without reducing it to some stark business transaction dealing with only dates, # of goods, and $$$. I see now that it's important to humanize the parties and use a narrative to impart the bigger picture of what was going on with the deal, and not just what appears in contract terms in the record.