Santayana Wasn’t Kidding
One of the critical elements of pragmatism and of Not News’ overall philosophy is that nothing exists in a vacuum; the connections between events, ideas, statements and people add shadings of meaning beyond what we can find in ‘the thing itself.’ Without trying to, I discovered a vivid example of this recently while reading through some graphic novels I recently purchased, a group that included Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Maus and Joe Sacco’s American-Book-Award-winning Palestine. Those accolades should make clear that each is a tremendous work on its own; each is a nonfiction narrative with great emotional power. Reading them so close together, however, hit me especially hard, due to their thematic connections and shared contexts.
Maus is a fascinatingly multi-leveled story. It is a recounting of Spiegelman’s father Vladek’s recollections of his life as a Jew in German-occupied Poland and in Auschwitz. It is also the story of Spiegelman’s relationship with his father during the conversations in which he tells his son the stories over a period of several years. Yet further, it also becomes at times the story of Spiegelman’s efforts to finish the story years later, after his father has died and after the initial chapters of the story (which was originally published in serial form) were published to great acclaim.
All of this is done with deceptively simple art that features anthropomorphized animals rather than humans as characters — Jews are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, Americans as dogs, Poles as pigs, and so on. While some have complained that the device smacks of racial and ethnic stereotyping (especially in the case of the Poles), I found it to be effective, at least for an American audience long familiar with such anthropomorphic characters as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. In much the same way that the violent antics of Looney Tunes don’t quite seem real, Spiegelman’s cats and mice give us a little bit of emotional distance from the horrors of the events depicted. Given the intensity of those events, that can be necessary, and lets the reader absorb more of what the characters are saying as the emotions that Spiegelman infuses into these characters. (As for the stereotyping, I didn’t find it to be much of a problem. As someone of partial Polish descent, the pigs did throw me off for a moment. At the same time, whether it’s the alliteration or my association of my Polish roots with pork roasts, kielbasa and the like, or something else entirely, it also somehow seemed to fit. More importantly, the animal avatars are purely a visual device — Spiegelman no more portrays the Poles as being like pigs than he does the Americans as being like dogs.)
The accounts of Spiegelman’s meetings with Vladek are more than a mere framing device; they are as essential as the Holocaust recollections. Here, Spiegelman is either brutally honest or lacking in storytelling skill, or perhaps both. There is clearly tension between the two Spiegelmans; it seems apparent that if Spiegelman were not working on his comics project, he would not want to have much, if anything at all, to do with his father. In depicting this tension, Spiegelman often comes off as immature and self-centered; he is unwilling to go to his father’s house to help him replace storm windows, and he calls his father a murderer when he finds out that Vladek destroyed the journals that his mother (who had long ago committed suicide) had kept during her time in the camps. Spiegelman tries to portray Vladek as a difficult man, demanding and even cruel to others and frugal to the point of miserliness. In most cases, though, I found a lot more to like in the father than in the son, and he didn’t strike me as any more set-in-his-ways or difficult than many of the other people I know of that generation, and it is clear that he loved his first wife and that he loves his son. Whatever causes Spiegelman to view his father the way he does, it does not come across clearly on the page, even as so many other parts of the story do.
A few weeks after I read Maus I picked up Palestine, a relatively recent collection of Sacco’s series from the early 1990s about his two months in the Israeli-occupied territories in the early stages of the intifadeh (or uprising). Trained as a journalist, Sacco bounced from town to town, refugee camp to refugee camp, trying to collect as many stories as possible from the Palestinians. While Sacco provides some details to set the historical context, Palestine does not attempt to be a thorough treatment of the history of the region or the root causes of the conflict, nor is he concerned with achieving the dispassionate ‘here’s one side of the story, now here’s the other side with equal time’ attitude that is usually considered to be ‘objective’ news reporting. He is concerned with truth and with facts, but he also makes clear that he believes that the American audience has thus far received a one-sided view of the Palestinian issue and that he hopes to do at least a little to rectify that.
In doing so, Sacco doesn’t spend too much time with any one group of people, and so it’s somewhat difficult to really identify with many. It is not impossible, however, and that’s a testament to Sacco’s writing and drawing skill. He distills each person’s story to its essential details without leaving out emotional resonance, conveying rage, despair, grief and hatred in an atmosphere of violence, poverty and injustice. The description of conditions in the Ansar III prison camp, or of the efforts of Israeli soldiers to coerce confessions from prisoners, are vivid for being relatively brief.
Morever, his detailed and realistic landscapes and surroundings contrast with a more distorted, almost cartoon-like depiction of human beings, with facial features (especially mouths) getting increased emphasis. In part because we don’t get immersed in any one person’s story, Sacco’s hyper-realism is as well-suited to his story as Spiegelman’s abstract simplicity is to the highly personal Maus. Sacco also makes liberal use of captions to provide narration for the story, and unlike the tidy rectangles that many comics raders might be used to, these caption boxes often seem to fall haphazardly over the page, graphically demonstrating his disjointed and hurried stream of thought while going through security checkpoints, smuggling illegal videos from house to house, or trying to figure out what exactly he is trying to accomplish so that he can explain it to the skeptical Palestinians who have come to distrust the West and its media.
As I’ve said, Palestine on its own is a tremendous work, one that I can’t recommend highly enough. But reading it so soon after I read Maus at times filled me with a sense of despair. To see Jews with the Star of David sewn onto their coats harassed, interrogated and tortured by German soldiers, and then to see Israeli soldiers take Palestinians from their homes, beat them, and hold them in squalid prisons without trials while trying to force them to sign confessions was truly disheartening. I kept thinking of George Santayana’s warning that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, and I found myself wanting to scream ‘Have we learned anything?’ In the weeks since, as I look at today’s environment of us vs. them ideologies and wars on terror, I still wonder if we have . . . or worse, if we have learned the wrong lesson.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.