The Art of Spiegelman

A full 18 months out of university, it wouldn't be a bad bet to suggest that I've probably forgotten anything valuable I paid the best part of £20,000 grand to learn. I did a literature degree and, by the end, was understandably sick of the site of novels, let alone poetry. To give you an idea of my declining interest in traditional literature, I've gone from reading two to three novels a week during my studies to having read three books in the last year and a half, two of which were autobiographies.

But, over the weekend, a documentary popped up on my Sky planner which reminded me exactly why I chose to give three years of my life to an arts degree which, if you believe some, isn't the best way to go about getting a job. The documentary was called The Art of Spiegelman and documented the work of Art Spiegelman, a graphic novelist of Jewish descent, famed for his depiction of his parents' and his own subsequent experience of the Holocaust, in Maus.



Maus is essentially a portrayal of the Holocaust, in which Jews are portrayed as Mice and Nazis as Cats. But there's so much more going on - particularly Art's own understanding of being a member of the generation of Jews that was born after the Holocaust, and had to come to terms with the guilt of their heritage. Before Maus, I'd never read a graphic novel, but it showed me how much can be done in the cartoon format. After all, a picture tells a thousand words, so why write all of them out?

For example, in the frame above, Spiegelman portrays himself as a human in a mouse mask, not as a fully-fledged animal. I wrote reams on what that little intricacy could mean for the post-Holocaust generation of Jews.

I'm not a particularly morbid person but trauma and the Holocaust in particular whet my literary appetite, which is what draws attracts me to Spiegelman's work. Like most students, I skipped uni classes that weren't (in my opinion) worth getting out of bed for but, whether I was fresh as a daisy or still half-drunk from the night before, I drank in every minute of my Holocaust module.

Back to the Spiegelman documentary though, and it turns out, Maus wasn't the only traumatic event his work has tackled. A New York resident, Spiegelman was in his office when the planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. His daughter's high school was just four blocks away and in the likely impact zone had the towers toppled instead of collapsing. From the experience of that day, he produced In The Shadow of No Towers.

I've tried to explain my fascination with trauma in my academic essays, and I'm still not sure what the route is. Perhaps it's because, no matter how many ways you read about it, things like the Holocaust are only understandable through experience. And maybe not even then. It's just one continuous process of trying to learn about something you can never fully comprehend. I don't have a spare 10,000 hours but I'm willing to guess that it still wouldn't be enough to master what the Holocaust or 9/11 mean about the world we live in.

But it won't stop me trying.