Maus Now: Selected Writing by Hillary Chute

Author:Hillary Chute [Chute, Hillary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Maus II, page 99

On one level, then, Maus celebrates English. By displaying its heroic capacity to transform and pacify the most adverse conditions, Maus conveys a sense of the unlimited power of English, of its almost magical potency, even of its harboring the secret of life and death. Seemingly, English can master anything it confronts, can dominate whatever demands subjection. This celebration would seem to authorize English as a language of testimony, investing it with the knowledge and power to chronicle the events of the Holocaust with unparalleled eloquence. This glorification of English would likely confirm what American readers of the late twentieth century believe about the language they—or their neighbors—speak.

On another level, however, Spiegelman’s graphic novel tells a story about limitations, and particularly about the limitations of English as language of the Holocaust. Maus inscribes these limits ironically, designating fluency, competence, and mastery as relative and questionable accomplishments. The very capacity to use words well often becomes the ironic sign of blindness and coercion. Significantly, Maus enforces the limitations of English by representing as authoritative an English that is uniquely broken, incompetent, unmastered. Indeed, the only English by which to tell “a survivor’s tale” is one that is singularly foreign. Such a repositioning of English would seem to go against expectations of an American audience, asking them, asking us, to question the fantasy—one that Maus itself rehearses—that English can know and master everything, even the Holocaust.

I am grateful to Alan Berger, Ruth Clements, Jorg Drewitz, Nancy Harrowitz, Lindsay Kaplan, and Herbert Levine for their reading of and comments on various stages of this manuscript.

(1995)

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