Kafka, “The Great Swimmer” [fragment] summary (with commentary and reproduction)

 

by Corry Shores
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Summary (with Commentary) of

Franz Kafka

“The Great Swimmer”

 

Brief Summary:

A great swimmer has set a record in the Olympic Games, and she has returned to her hometown. She is then taken to a banquet. Yet [somehow] she also is not in her “fatherland.” In fact, she cannot understand anything that the people around her are saying. She gives a speech to the guests confessing this. She also admits that she cannot even swim, and she has no idea why the country has sent her to the games to compete in the first place. Deleuze and Deleuze & Guattari are interested in two related elements of this story. In both points, the issue is that the swimmer is managing, even with great success, in territory that is somehow foreign. There are both the components of being “a fish out of water” and of performing “swimmingly” in the foreign elements. 1) The swimmer is foreign to swimming and to the waters, since she does not know how to swim, and yet still sets an Olympic record. Also, 2) the swimmer is managing not knowing the language of the foreign land she finds herself in, even though she also calls the area her home.

Summary

The Great Swimmer was returning to her hometown from the Olympic Games in Antwerp, where she had “just set a world record in swimming” (118). The people greeting her there repeatedly shouted “Hail the great swimmer!” Then a girl hangs a sash around the swimmer which says in a foreign language, “The Olympic Champion.” The swimmer is then pushed into a car and driven away along with the mayor. They arrive at a banquet hall. Then “A choir sang down from the gallery as I entered and all the guests—there were hundreds—rose and shouted, in perfect unison, a phrase that I didn't exactly understand” (118). The swimmer becomes distressed for unknown reasons when being introduced to the minister and his voluptuous wife. Across from the swimmer sat a fat man with a cheerful and beautiful blond girl sitting at both his sides. He did not recognize the other guests, perhaps since “everything was in motion” (119). The waiters brought out the food, and the people toasted. There was also a “disorderly element,” namely, there were several women sitting with their backs to the table, and somehow they are positioned such that not even the backs of the chairs intervened. When the swimmer notes this to the girls across from him, they say nothing and merely smile. A bell then rings. The waiters freeze still, and the fat man rises and delivers a speech. He was sad during it, and he wiped his face with a handkerchief in such a way that he concealed himself wiping his tearing eyes. “Also, although he looked directly at me as he spoke, it was as if he weren't seeing me, but rather my open grave” (119). When the fat man finished, the swimmer felt compelled to stand up and speak too.

The swimmer tells the guests that although he broke a world record in swimming, she in fact cannot even swim. Additionally, she does not even know why she was even sent to the Olympic Games in the firs place. Moreover, she is not even in her fatherland [this seems to contradict the opening statement that she has returned to her hometown].

“Honored guests! I have, admittedly, broken a world record. | If, however, you were to ask me how I have achieved this, I could not answer adequately. Actually, I cannot even swim. I have always wanted to learn, but have never had the opportunity. How then did it come to be that I was sent by my country to the Olympic Games? This is, of course, also the question I ask of myself. I must first explain that I am not now in my fatherland and, in spite of considerable effort, cannot understand a word of what has been spoken. Your first thought might be that there has been some mistake, but there has been no mistake — I have broken the record, have returned to my country, and do indeed bear the name by which you know me. All this is true, but thereafter nothing is true. I am not in my fatherland, and I do not know or understand you. And now something that is somehow, even if not exactly, incompatible with this notion of a mistake: It does not much disturb me that I do not understand you and, likewise, the fact that you do not understand me does not seem to disturb you. I could only gather from the speech of the venerable gentleman who preceded me that it was inconsolably sad, and this knowledge is not only sufficient, in fact for me it is too much. And indeed, the same is true of all the conversations I have had here since my return. But let us return to my world record.”
(119-120)

 

Commentary

From Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.

What interests him even more is the possibility of making of his own language – assuming that it is unique, that it is a major language or has been – a minor utilization. To be a sort of stranger within his own language; this is the situation of Kafka's Great Swimmer.²⁵
(26)
[Footnote 25 [quoting]:
25. “The Great Swimmer” is undoubtedly one of the most Beckett-like of Kafka's texts: “I have to well admit that I am in my own country and that, in spite of all my efforts, I don't understand a word of the language that you are speaking.”
(94)]

 

Gilles Deleuze, in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

The sole spectacle is in fact the spectacle of waiting or effort, but these are produced only when there are no longer any spectators. This is where Bacon resembles Kafka: Bacon's Figure is the great Scandal, | or the great Swimmer who does not know how to swim, the champion of abstinence; and the ring, the amphitheater, the platform is the theater of Oklahoma. In this respect, everything in Bacon reaches its culmination in the Painting of 1978 [81] : stuck onto a panel, the Figure tenses its entire body and a leg, in order to turn the key in the door with its foot from the other side of the painting.
(13-14)

 

 

From Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?

Through having reached the percept as “the sacred source,” through having seen Life in the living or the Living in the lived, the novelist or painter returns breathless and with bloodshot eyes. They are athletes – not athletes who train their bodies and cultivate the lived, no matter how many writers have succumbed to the idea of sport as a way of heightening art and life, but bizarre athletes of the “fasting-artist” type, or the “great Swimmer” who does not know how to swim. It is not an organic or muscular athleticism but its inorganic double, “an affective Athleticism,” an athleticism of becoming that reveals only forces that are not its own – “plastic specter.” In this respect artists are like philosophers. What little health they possess is often too fragile, not because of their illnesses or neuroses but because they have seen something in life that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves, and that has put on them the quiet mark of death. But this something is also the source or breath that supports them through | the illnesses or the lived (what Nietzsche called health). “Perhaps one day we will know that there wasn't any art but only medicine.”
(172-173)

 

 

Reproduction [quoting from source]

English Translation by Daniel Slager

 

Hail the great swimmer! Hail the great swimmer!" the people shouted. I was coming from the Olympic Games in Antwerp, where I had just set a world record in swimming. I stood at the top of the steps outside the train station in my Hometown—where was it?—and looked down at the indiscernible throng in the dusk. A girl, whose cheek I stroked cursorily, hung a sash around me, on which was written in a foreign language: The Olympic Champion. An automobile drove up and several men pushed me into it. Two other men drove along—the mayor and someone else. At once we were in a banquet room. A choir sang down from the gallery as I entered and all the guests—there were hundreds—rose and shouted, in perfect unison, a phrase that I didn't exactly understand. To my left sat a minister; I don't know why the word "minister" horrified me so much when we were introduced. At first I measured him wildly with my glances, but soon composed myself. To my right sat the mayor's wife, a voluptuous woman; everything about her, particularly her bosom, seemed to emanate roses and the finest down. Across from me sat a fat man with a strikingly white face, whose name I had missed during the introductions. He had placed his elbows on the table—a particularly large place had been made for him—and looked straight ahead in silence. To his right and left sat two beautiful blond girls. They were cheerful and constantly had something to say, and I looked from one to the other. In spite of the more than ample lighting, though, I couldn't clearly recognize many of the other guests, perhaps because everything was in motion. The waiters scurried around, dishes arrived at the tables, and glasses were raised—indeed, perhaps everything was too well illuminated. There was also a certain disorder—the only disorderly element, actually-in the fact that several guests, particularly women, were sitting with their backs turned to the table and, further, in such a way that not even the backs of their chairs were between them and the table, but rather that their backs were almost touching the table. I drew the attention of the girls across from me to this, but while they had otherwise been so garrulous, now they said nothing, and instead only smiled at me with long looks. When a bell rang, the waiters froze in their positions and the fat man across from me rose and delivered a speech. But why was he so sad? During the speech he dabbed at his face with a handkerchief, which was quite understandable in light of his obesity, the heat in the room, and the strains of the speech itself. But I distinctly noticed that the whole effect was merely a clever disguise, meant to conceal the fact that he was wiping tears from his eyes. Also, although he looked directly at me as he spoke, it was as if he weren't seeing me, but rather my open grave. After he had finished, I, of course, also stood up and delivered a speech. I felt compelled to speak, for there was much that needed to be said, both here and probably also elsewhere, for the public's enlightenment. And so I began:

“Honored guests! I have, admittedly, broken a world record. If, however, you were to ask me how I have achieved this, I could not answer adequately. Actually, I cannot even swim. I have always wanted to learn, but have never had the opportunity. How then did it come to be that I was sent by my country to the Olympic Games? This is, of course, also the question I ask of myself. I must first explain that I am not now in my fatherland and, in spite of considerable effort, cannot understand a word of what has been spoken. Your first thought might be that there has been some mistake, but there has been no mistake—I have broken the record, have returned to my country, and do indeed bear the name by which you know me. All this is true, but thereafter nothing is true. I am not in my fatherland, and I do not know or understand you. And now something that is somehow, even if not exactly, incompatible with this notion of a mistake: It does not much disturb me that I do not understand you and, likewise, the fact that you do not understand me does not seem to disturb you. I could only gather from the speech of the venerable gentleman who preceded me that it was inconsolably sad, and this knowledge is not only sufficient, in fact for me it is too much. And indeed, the same is true of all the conversations I have had here since my return. But let us return to my world record.”

German at kafka.org

Der große Schwimmer! Der große Schwimmer! riefen die Leute. Ich kam von der Olympiade in X, wo ich einen Weltrekord im Schwimmen erkämpft hatte. Ich stand auf der Freitreppe des Bahnhofes meiner Heimatsstadt – wo ist sie? – und blickte auf die in der Abenddämmerung undeutliche Menge. Ein Mädchen dem ich flüchtig über die Wange strich, hängte mir flink eine Schärpe um, auf der in einer fremden Sprache stand: Dem olympischen Sieger. Ein Automobil fuhr vor, einige Herren drängten mich hinein, zwei Herren fuhren auch mit, der Bürgermeister und noch jemand. Gleich waren wir in einem Festsaal, von der Gallerie herab sang ein Chor, als ich eintrat, alle Gäste, es waren hunderte, erhoben sich und riefen im Takt einen Spruch den ich nicht genau verstand. Links von mir saß ein Minister, ich weiß nicht warum mich das Wort bei der Vorstellung so erschreckte, ich maß ihn wild mit den Blicken, besann mich aber bald, rechts saß die Frau des Bürgermeisters, eine üppige Dame, alles an ihr, besonders in der Höhe der Brüste, erschien mir voll Rosen und Straußfedern. Mir gegenüber saß ein dicker Mann mit auffallend weißem Gesicht, seinen Namen hatte ich bei der Vorstellung überhört, er hatte die Elbogen auf den Tisch gelegt – es war ihm besonders viel Platz gemacht worden – sah vor sich hin und schwieg, rechts und links von ihm saßen zwei schöne blonde Mädchen, lustig waren sie, immerfort hatten sie etwas zu erzählen und ich sah von einer zur andern. Weiterhin konnte ich trotz der reichen Beleuchtung die Gäste nicht scharf erkennen, vielleicht weil alles in Bewegung war, die Diener umherliefen, die Speisen gereicht, die Gläser gehoben wurden, vielleicht war alles sogar allzusehr beleuchtet. Auch war eine gewisse Unordnung – die einzige übrigens – die darin bestand daß einige Gäste, besonders Damen, mit dem Rücken zum Tisch gekehrt saßen undzwar so, daß nicht etwa die Rückenlehne des Sessels dazwischen war, sondern der Rücken den Tisch fast berührte. Ich machte die Mädchen mir gegenüber darauf aufmerksam, aber während sie sonst so gesprächig waren, sagten sie diesmal nichts, sondern lächelten mich nur mit langen Blicken an. Auf ein Glockenzeichen – die Diener erstarrten zwischen den Sitzreihen – erhob sich der Dicke gegenüber und hielt eine Rede. Warum nur der Mann so traurig war! Während der Rede betupfte er mit dem Taschentuch das Gesicht, das wäre ja hingegangen, bei seiner Dicke, der Hitze im Saal, der Anstrengung des Redens wäre das verständlich gewesen, aber ich merkte deutlich, daß das Ganze nur eine List war, die verbergen sollte, daß er sich die Tränen aus den Augen wischte. Nachdem er geendet hatte, stand natürlich ich auf und hielt auch eine Rede. Es drängte mich geradezu zu sprechen, denn manches schien mir hier und wahrscheinlich auch anderswo der öffentlichen und offenen Aufklärung bedürftig, darum begann ich:

Geehrte Festgäste! Ich habe zugegebener maßen einen Weltrekord, wenn Sie mich aber fragen würden wie ich ihn erreicht habe, könnte ich Ihnen nicht befriedigend antworten. Eigentlich kann ich nämlich gar nicht schwimmen. Seit jeher wollte ich es lernen, aber es hat sich keine Gelegenheit dazu gefunden. Wie kam es nun aber, daß ich von meinem Vaterland zur Olympiade geschickt wurde? Das ist eben auch die Frage die mich beschäftigt. Zunächst muß ich feststellen, daß ich hier nicht in meinem Vaterland bin und trotz großer Anstrengung kein Wort von dem verstehe was hier gesprochen wird. Das naheliegendste wäre nun an eine Verwechslung zu glauben, es liegt aber keine Verwechslung vor, ich habe den Rekord, bin in meine Heimat gefahren, heiße so wie Sie mich nennen, bis dahin stimmt alles, von da ab aber stimmt nichts mehr, ich bin nicht in meiner Heimat, ich kenne und verstehe Sie nicht. Nun aber noch etwas, was nicht genau, aber doch irgendwie der Möglichkeit einer Verwechslung widerspricht: es stört mich nicht sehr, daß ich Sie nicht verstehe und auch Sie scheint es nicht sehr zu stören, daß Sie mich nicht verstehen. Von der Rede meines geehrten Herrn Vorredners glaube ich nur zu wissen daß sie trostlos traurig war, aber dieses Wissen genügt mir nicht nur, es ist mir sogar noch zuviel. Und ähnlich verhält es sich mit allen Gesprächen, die ich seit meiner Ankunft hier geführt habe. Doch kehren wir zu meinem Weltrekord zurück

 

 

 

 

Works Cited:

Kafka, Franz. “The Great Swimmer.” Selection from “Fragments.” Translated by Daniel Slager. Grand Street, no. 56, “Dreams,” (Spring, 1996), pp.117-122. Available at JSTOR:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25008008
And online:
http://www.grandstreet.com/gsissues/gs56/gs56e.html

Kafka, Franz. “Es war der erste Spatenstich” (II, 9). Unpublished manuscripts: Winter 1917/18 – Spring 1922.
At kafka.org:
http://www.kafka.org/index.php?spatenstich

 

Commentary Sources:

 

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. London/Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London/New York: Continuum, 2003.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York/Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University, 1994.

Spiegelman. Selections from Maus II

by Corry Shores
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Notable Selections from
[with commentary]

Art Spiegelman

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, vol.2

 

 

 

 

Selections

 

Art Spiegelman has very interesting theories about the portrayal and experience of time and memory in the comics medium. We will not get into them too much here. Our current interests are in the animal form of Maus. However, in some cases there will be intersections with the theme of time. Spiegelman says of the animal forms that “I tend to think of it as humans with animal heads” (1991 UWTV interview). These animal heads wear masks of other animal forms. But also, Spiegelman suggests that even the unconcealed animal faces are masks on human heads. We will see in the selection below from Maus II Art himself, along with interviewers, having a human head covered with an animal mask. First  note however the temporality. Time has passed since the first Maus, which was already mixing past and present. That former present is now a past. But even the new narrational present will be read in the future, making it past in advance. The basic format of telling the story from someone’s memory has a sort of non-oriented eternal temporality. This sort of portrayal and experience of narrative time was masterfully executed also in issue four of Alan Moore’s (writer), Dave Gibbons’ (artist), and John Higgins’ (colorist) Watchmen.

We see something similar in the “Time Flies” section of Maus II.

We (above) also see Art wearing the mouse mask, and others wearing dog and cat masks (below).

Another theme is the changing relations, alliances, bonds, and organizations based on exchanges of goods and services. Social structures which once held are shown during this time to have broken down, with new relations springing up spontaneously on the basis of mutually beneficial exchanging. Here we see Vladek building a relation with the chief of the tinmen, who at first was antagonistic toward Vladek, but warmed up as soon as Vladek began bribing him.

Vladek often saves things, like a mouse storing away food for later. In this case, he explains how he would save bread made with sawdust, which might remind us of how he and Anja gnawed on wood while in a bunker, to stave off hunger.

In another scene, Vladek is in Auschwitz, and he is talking secretly to his wife Anja. He says to her not to share with her friends, since their only concern is getting food from her. This is interesting since Vladek himself knows how to build advantageous friendships by giving away food. His point perhaps is not so much that it is bad to give away food but rather that one must be strategic in whom to invest one’s goods.

One of the themes of Maus of course is survival, and the question is, how does Vladek survive? When discussing the following instructional diagram (below), Spiegelman recalls how his father told him, “You must know everything to survive” (MetaMaus, p.54). We see very often throughout Maus Vladek taking on new occupational identities (as well as cultural and national identities). His identity is flexible, in other words, and he often exercises the self-creative power of falsehood. He pretends himself to be something before being it, and then he in that declaration-enacted transition becomes it. Notice that he has never fixed shoes before, but he proved himself better than the prior shoe repairmen in his first attempt.

We return now to the idea of friendship and forming larger compositions to aid survival. Here we see Vladek forming advantageous relations through exchange, and he says, “If you want to live, it’s good to be friendly.”

Another theme is that the cartoon animal masks allow the reader to attain greater proximity to the events and to the personal experiences of the characters. This is because the figures are not specific. They do not give us a photo-realistic presentation of Vladek’s face, for example. Instead, it could be any person. While engaging with the visual story, we project our own inner worlds onto these “blank sheets”. This for example allows us to see Vladek as our own father or as ourselves or as some other loved one, and to sympathize much more strongly with the character. Before viewing it, first recall Spiegelman’s point that the animal faces are like Little Orphan Annie’s face, where the blankness of the eyes allows for a more personal projection than Li’l Abner.

Here is the Maus panel, which I find to be one of the most deeply moving images in comics.

In another scene, the war was apparently ending, and prisoners were planning for when the Germans, seeing the need to retreat, were going to move the Jews in the camps back to Germany. Another prisoner tells Vladek of these rumors, and they plan for an escape, with false identity papers and civilian clothes.

Later, as the prisoners are being marched to another camp, Vladek tells a story that is important for the notion of dehumanization. He sees a man who gets shot and whose dying movements resemble the way that a dog dies. In MetaMaus, Spiegelman discusses this important scene.

Spiegelman:

I guess it’s all an inquiry into what it means to be human in a dehumanizing world. When my father told me about his long death march out of Auschwitz near the end of the war, he describes hearing gunshots and then, at some point, he sees far ahead of him, “somebody jumping, rolling 25 or 35 times around and stops.” he tells me, “Oh, I said, they maybe killed there a dog,” because my father [133|134] hadn’t had that many experiences of seeing people shot close up, if any (although of course he did shoot someone from a distance when he was a Polish soldier). And he goes on to say, “When I was a boy, our neighbor had a dog what god mad and was biting; the neighbor came out with a rifle and shot. The dog was rolling so, around and around, kicking, before he lay quiet, and now I thought, ‘How amazing it is that a human being reacts the same like this neighbor’s dog.’”

When he told me that anecdote, he certainly wasn’t thinking about me telling his story with animal surrogates – but I instantly knew this would become a key page in the story. I worked hard to make the transition between human/mouse and animal/dog as clear as I could. My father describes how “the dog rolled around and around, kicking before he lay quiet,” and that is worked out visually as a roll across the page. I didn’t try to present it cinematically, which would have been a bit corny, but I took advantage of the way the eye assimilates a page; it was analogous to showing a human rolling around, fading into a dog rolling around, and fading back into a human as it does.
(MetaMaus 133-134)

We then see another example of bribery not working.

Vladek shows his survival cleverness when he is packed with many other prisoners into a rail car. He sees hooks on the ceiling and fashions a hammock sort of platform to elevate himself out of the crowd and near the window where he could get snow to eat.

He uses his position to negotiate for sugar. He trades snow for spoon of it. But  the scene is odd, since it seems uncharitable. Why does Vladek not give the snow freely, especially since the prisoners’ throats are burning from the sugar? Perhaps the situation is unfair to begin with, since some have sugar and some not, and some have access to snow and some not. In the audio recording provided in MetaMaus, there is less material, and it makes Vladek seem more charitable.

Art: You did not have any food or anything to drink?

Vladek: I still had something in the knapsack, but not much. But there were also some people who had sugar – I don’t know; they organized in some places sugar. So they lived on the sugar. But – the sugar started burning them, because they didn’t have any water. And I could push out my hand through the bar from the little window, and I lived mostly on the snow, because it was a lot of snow on the roof, and I grabbed the snow, and I lived on the snow, and I had a small pieces of bread.

But later on, I manage that I got sugar. How did I get the sugar? Because the people who were down, standing, they begged me for a little, little bits of snow. But I told them I cannot reach. I reach only a little bit for myself. So they gave me a spoon of sugar, and for a spoon of sugar, I gave him a handful of snow. To save his life.
(MetaMaus 267. Italicized parts are not in the audio recording, seemingly edited out)

There is a remarkable scene in the present when Vladek tries to return opened and half eaten food boxes to the grocery store. Art and his wife stay in the car, not wanting to be present at such an embarrassing interaction. Art’s wife says it is a miracle Vladek survived the ghettos and camps. Art replies that in some ways he did not survive. This seems to be losses to his personality or in something else about him, since he seems so scarred and transformed by his extraordinarily difficult experiences. However, we also noted elsewhere that Vladek was supposedly always tight with his money, and perhaps it was only reinforced by the experience in the camps. At any rate, Art’s observation suggests that Vladek’s survival came at the cost of a constant identity.

The next page we examine is notable both in showing the extents the prisoners were willing to go in order to get basic sustenance, but also it speaks to the issues of time and memory. In the present there are the scars of the past, which keep the past alive in the present as indelible traces. The scars of course are emotional as well. Art often refers to how it was not uncommon for  his parents to wake up in the middle of the night screaming.

There is another scene where Vladek shows his cleverness and perhaps as well the power of falsity. Here he fakes being without lice by using a dummy shirt.

Vladek later explains that he had forgotten a lot, having put away many memories when burning letters with Anja’s notebooks. He then says Art’s Maus project is rebuilding that part of his past.

There is an interesting visual mixture of present and past in the title panel for the fourth chapter.

There is also an interesting series of pages with photographs. Here we again see this theme of past and present mixing.

Finally, there is a scene where the animal metaphor breaks down, according to Spiegelman, because we have a mixed couple of German and Jew, with their child showing mouse form but cat stripes.

From:

Spiegelman, Art. Maus, book 2: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991.

 

 

Or if otherwise noted:

Art Spiegelman. Television Program entitled, "The Holocaust Through the Eyes of a Maus (Art Spiegelman)." University of Washington Television (UWTV). Available on youtube: https://youtu.be/BLVG3GNvHkU

Spiegelman, Art [with Hillary Chute (interviewer)]. MetaMaus. New York: Pantheon/Random House, 2011.

Rosen (Alan), “The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor in Art Spiegelman’s Maus”, summary

by Corry Shores
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[Bracketed commentary, underlining, and boldface are my own.]

Summary of

Alan C. Rosen

“The Language of Survival:
English as Metaphor in Art Spiegelman’s Maus”

Brief Summary:

Vladek tells his story in a broken English that we would expect from an East European immigrant. English has been argued by some as inadequate for telling the story of the Holocaust, since English was not a commonly used language among the people involved. Vladek’s broken English, however, gives his testimony an authoritative voice [perhaps because it is truer to or closer to the actual languages that were used], while at the same time, its imperfections indicate that English has limitations to its authority in this task [perhaps since the mistakes suggest inaccuracies in the descriptions].

Summary

Although there is much study given to the languages spoken by victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust, little has been devoted to English.

Yet in Maus, Art Spiegelman emphasizes the extraordinary role English plays in aiding his father’s survival. The prominence of English in the chronicle of events implicitly directs attention to the fractured English in which the survivor’s story is told and, more generally, to the complex significance of language and languages in representing the Holocaust. (122)

Rosen claims that “Maus’s exceptional concern with English operates on at least three levels” (122).
1) Vladek’s abilities with English play an important role in his courting his first wife Anja and for helping him survive the camps.
2) Vladek’s English is broken. “In contrast to the biographical events recounted, Vladek’s English here is noteworthy not because of competence but rather because of incompetence” (122).
3) Most of the other English speakers have fluency, which [somehow] “frames and envelops both Vladek’s biography and his Holocaust narrative, establishing English as the dominant language.”
And [somehow] “These three levels interrogate the status of English as a language of the Holocaust and, consequently, as a language (un)fit to recount the Holocaust” (122d).

Other Holocaust studies have examined the significance of specific languages, primarily Yiddish, Hebrew, and German, but also other European languages including English.

Sidra Ezrahi, for example, positions English in opposition to Yiddish and German, the major languages of the victim and persecutor, respectively (12)¹. In contrast, English, of little significance in the camps and ghettos, has a marginal standing, making it an “outsider” and marking it with “autonomy” and “purity.” Moreover, Ezrahi places English in opposition in another way: as the chief language of the Allies, English came to stand for “defiance,” for “a different hierarchy of values,” values presumably informed by the democratic ideals associated with English-speaking countries.
(123)

[Footnote 1 on page 132: “1. Ezrahi’s more recent views pertaining to language and the Holocaust can be found in several essays, including “ ‘The Grave in the Air’: Unbound Metaphors in Post-Holocaust Poetry” (in Friedlander, Probing the Limits 259-76) and “Conversation in the Cemetery: Dan Pagis and the Prosaics of Memory” (in Hartman, Holocaust Remembrance 121-33). Ezrahi is one of a procession of critics who have ventured a taxonomy of Holocaust languages. See, e.g., Steiner; Roskies, “Scribes of the Ghetto,” in Against the Apocalypse; Gillman, “The Ashes of the Holocaust and the Closure of Self-Hatred,” in Jewish Self-Hatred; Levi, “Communicating,” in The Drowned and the Savedi; Felman, “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in Felman and Laub, Testimony.]

But in “Ezrahi’s schema,” English not only serves a heroic role outside the atrocity. The “schema also suggests its vulnerability;” for, “because it was not vitally implicated in the events of the Holocaust, English is less qualified to represent them” (123). In one of the most important Holocaust anthologies, Anthology of Holocaust Literature, editor Israel Knox explains that the primary languages are Hebrew and Yiddish, with English playing only a “tertiary role” (123).

So we have then this context of an “antithetical legacy of English as a language of the Holocaust” that comes from it being outside to the situation and thus unable to contribute very well to the accuracy of documentation. Maus takes English however as a central theme in its account. Rosen then notes that the title sounds like the English word ‘mouse’. But it is instead written in German, which “ ‘contaminates’ it, associating it with, rather than opposing it to, the essential languages of the Holocaust” (124a).

Rosen continues, “This strategy would seem to endow English with an authority that it previously lacked” (124). However, there are two ways that this mixture “provokes suspicion” 1) It is still questionable that the German language is fit for representing the Holocaust, and 2) Native English speakers will find the foreign spelling “something strange and disconcerting” (124).

Thus on the one hand, Spiegelman’s title moves “English from outside to inside of the Holocaust,” while “On another level” it posits “English as foreign” thereby frustrating “the American audience’s sense of familiarity, moving the reader, in a sense, from inside to outside the Holocaust” (124).

Rosen explains that this essay will “elaborate the strategies Spiegelman employs throughout Maus to effect this reformulation and revaluation of English” (124).

[Untitled Section Break]

English as a subject first comes up in Anja’s and Vladek’s early courtship. Anja and her cousin try to conceal their judgments of Vladek by speaking in English, and Vladek surprises Anja when he reveals he understood it all.

“As a language of secrets, it signifies a language spoken to prohibit understanding, specifically, the understanding of the one who is being spoken about” (124).

Rosen continues, “Whereas Anja resorts to English to deflect his understanding, Vladek employs it to appropriate a sensitive cluster of thought and feeling not his own. This dynamic parallels the ongoing issue of Vladek’s belief that he has full access to Anja’s story, a belief put in doubt repeatedly by Art’s counter-belief that Anja’s memoirs would give an alternative version of the events his parents lived through.
(125)

English also plays a role in understanding their class differences. Anja learns it in school, and Vladek had to quit school at 14 to work. Vladek learned English because he always wanted to go to America, which further suggests their class differences [since perhaps it indicates Vladek is poor and seeks better economic conditions abroad]. (125)

At this early stage of the story, “English is not yet a language of survival” (125).

However, “Early in Maus II, English returns to the foreground, serving as a form of knowledge that can generate extraordinary transformations. In the context of the concentration camp, this power to transform can determine survival. After deportation to Auschwitz and separation from Anja upon arrival, Vladek tries simply to remain alive.” He then becomes the kapo’s English tutor, and thereby is granted much better treatment. “Under the eye of a Polish kapo interested in bettering his own circumstances, English becomes the key to survival” (126).

For the kapo, English has “worth,” since with the prospect of the Allied powers possibly wining the war, “English has the capacity not only to aid survival but also to secure privileged status in the society one inhabits” (126).

English [for some reason] is not “pure,” and it acts as a commodity in the camps. It is subject to the laws of supply and demand, and therefore obtains an extraordinary exchange value.

This view of the worth of English suggests that English is not “pure,” that it does not inhabit a place outside camp society but rather, like other commodities, is subject to the particular logic and laws of camp life. And like other simple commodities in Auschwitz for which there is great demand and little supply, its value rises astronomically. (126)

And so “Vladek’s competence in English, and the association with the kapo that it garners, enables him to achieve a meteoric rise in status,” since he gains high quality food and clothes and preferential treatment (126).

Rosen continues that “The power of English to transform circumstances continues even as con- | ditions worsen” (126-127). [Rosen’s next observations have to do with Vladek’s use of English in the ‘present’ while he is recounting the stories to Art.] After Auschwitz, Vladek is marched to the concentration camp Dachau, and he says, “And here, in Dachau, my troubles began” (127, qting Maus II, p.91). Rosen’s first point is that “the phrase is clearly ironic because absurd: Vladek’s troubles began significantly earlier” (127). This idiom then is “inappropriate for the circumstances to which it refers.” Thus “Art calls attention to both Vladek’s foreignness – the difficulty of mastering English idioms – and to the foreignness of the experience – a degree of suffering that resists idiomatic formulation” (127).

Rosen continues that “One another level, however, it is clear that Vladek (or Art) wishes to suggest with this phrase that a new dimension of anguish here enters the story, anguish generated by a set of conditions in Dachau at the end of the war that brings Vladek closer to death than ever before – they were, he says, ‘waiting only to die’ ” (127). At Dachau, English again helps Vladek survive, since he uses it to communicate with a Frenchman, who shares his goods with Vladek (127).

But unlike before, “English here is not valued as a commodity but rather as a therapy, as a means of countering the madness of isolation that the Frenchmen suffers” (127).

Yet, after the war, when in America, Vladek corresponds with the Frenchmen but destroys his letters along with Anja’s in his depression following her suicide (128).

After the American invasion, “English continues to play a vital, if altered, role in Vladek’s story” (128). It is altered, since it no longer is needed for survival as before. Nonetheless, still “English becomes the language of the survivor” (128). Vladek uses English to explain his story to American soldiers. According to Rosen, that story told in English is used to identify himself, since the page transition seems to suggest that immediately or soon after when he was asked to identify himself, he tells in English what has taken place.

in response to the army’s command “Identify yourselves” (II:111), Spiegelman does not represent Vladek giving his name or any other of the usual factual details that might well be the common response to such a command. Rather, Vladek responds by telling for the first time his story of “ ow we survived to here” (II:112). Importantly, although they are still in Europe, the first telling of the story of the Holocaust is in English, and to an American audience, a telling, moreover, that is linked to identity.
(128)

Rosen then notes an “unsettling” element about English usage, which is that the American soldiers subordinate Vladek by only letting him stay if kept their place clean and made their beds, and they also called him “Willie.” This is “servile work and nomenclature that recall the stigmatized position imposed by white Americans on ‘Negroes’ of this time” and “English thus becomes even more deeply associated with  mastery and domination” (129).

[Second untitled section break]

Rosen then asks a number of questions. 1) English is a language of survival. How does this fact “inform the story Vladek tells in English? 2) On the one hand, English is associated with knowledge, power, transformation, and the ability to attest to one’s identity. On the other hand, Vladek testifies in broken English. How are we to understand these two factors in relation to one another? 3) At the beginning we noted the debate regarding whether or not English is a suitable language for capturing a historical event where English played only a small role but also where it is important to convey subtleties that might get lost in translation. And, there is a tension between “English as the competent language of survival and English as the incompetent language of the survivor.” How does this tension “address the issue of representing the Holocaust in English and the issue, more generally, of representing the Holocaust?” (129).

Vladek’s “tortured” English conveys the foreignness of the Holocaust

In one respect, the function of this “incompetence” is clear and forceful. Vladek’s accented English is mimetically appropriate for a Polish Jewish immigrant to America, and critics have noted in this light that Art has a “good ear.”⁹ But, I want to suggest, Vladek’s “tortured visualized prose” (N.K. Miller, “Cartoons of the Self” 58) is not only meant to represent an English-speaking “foreigner”  but is also meant to torture English into being a foreign language. Indeed, this quality of “foreignness” is the means by which English can become a language of testimony. By fracturing Vladek’s English and by making it the most foreign language in Maus (a point to which I will return), Spiegelman use it to convey the foreignness of the Holocaust itself.¹⁰
[Endnote 9 (quoting):] 9. As Alice Yaeger Kaplan phrases it, “One of the many extraordinary features of Maus is that Spiegelman gets the voices right, he gets the order of the words right, he manages to capture the intonations of Eastern Europe spoken by Queens” (“Theweleit and Spiegelman” 155).
(Rosen, 133)
[Endnote 10 (quoting):] 10. To be sure, Maus represents a range of languages foreign to English: Hebrew, Polish, Yiddish, German, French. Whereas Vladek’s Yiddish-English functions to estrange the reader, these other languages generally do not function so as to insist on | their own foreignness; Spiegelman uses words so common to even non-speakers that they do not need translation, or, in the case of Vladek’s Polish, he subtitles it with fluent English. the Hebrew that appears in Maus, to my mind, has a more ambiguous status; I hope to address its significance in a longer version of this essay.

Felman uses a similar metaphor of “foreignness” in analyzing Lanzmann’s Shoah in “The Return of the Voice,” and I am indebted to her discussion therein. Yet Spiegelman and Lanzmann pursue this notion by means of contrasting strategies. Whereas Lanzmann foregrounds the foreignness of the Holocaust by making sure multiple survivors speak in languages (native or adopted) different from one another and different from the narrative language of the film itself (French), Spiegelman makes this foreignness palpable through the voice of a single survivor whose testimony is in the same language as the narrative of the graphic novel.
(Rosen, 133-134)

Rosen observes that only Vladek uses this broken English, and other characters, such as Mala, Pavel, and Anja – who “would seem to be candidates for an accent more or less equal to that of Vladek” – in fact speak English fluently (129d). “It is for Vladek alone that Spiegelman reserves the distortions in syntax, the malapropisms, the quirky idiom – the stylistic correlative, as it were, of an accent” (130a).

There is also a temporal significance in Vladek’s broken English: “for episodes in the past, Spiegelman uses fluent, colloquial English to represent the languages of Europe as spoken by their native speakers; for episodes in the present, Vladek’s broken, accented English serves as a constant marker. […] with the terms Maus establishes, Vladek’s broken English becomes the means by which Spiegelman articulates the incommensurability between present and past” (130).

Although the earlier 3-page version of “Maus” has Vladek speaking in broken English, this non-standard usage is “less well defined and exceptional than it becomes in later full-length treatment” for two reasons: 1) Vladek uses this broken English in the same manner for both present and past, and thus unlike the graphic novel version, it does not use the language to distinguish “between Vladek in America and Vladek in Europe, between Vladek in the present and Vladek in the past” (130). 2) [Recall how in the graphic novel, only Vladek uses broken English and other characters like Anja have fluent English.] All European Jews speak with the accent in the 3-page “Maus.” In the attic bunker scene that was reused, Spiegelman changes one character’s dialogue to remove the accent (130).

Rosen claims that, “The contrast between the vignette and the books shows an evolution in Spiegelman’s representational vision of English” (130). In the earlier version, all victims have this accent, which “divides the linguistic world of Maus between native speaker and foreigner, between American and European” (130d), and thus it links members of a group (131a). However, “in the books the erasure of group accent and exaggeration of Vladek’s individual one make Vladek’s American English singular. Paradoxically, it is not the representation of the events of the Holocaust itself that is most foreign to the American readers of Maus; it is rather the telling about the Holocaust, the testimony, that carries the burden of everything that is foreign” (131).

In order to make the point that “Vladek’s broken English testimony is meant to carry immense authority,” Rosen notes the ‘present’ event of picking up a Black hitchhiker who also spoke in a dialect. Vladek reveals himself to have prejudicial views toward Black people, which suggests he “seems to have not learned the lesson of the Holocaust” (131).

What Rosen notes is that when saying insulting things about the hitchhiker, he uses Polish rather than broken English. Here,

the movement from English to Polish also mobilizes a set of representational values. No longer telling the story of the Holocaust but rather uttering racial slurs, it is as if Vladek has foregone the right to the “tortured” English that is the vehicle for his testimony. […] that fluency comes at the expense of, and suspends, the authority his tortured English evinces. (131)

We also see a shift of that authoritative voice of the victimhood of bigotry exhibited in the shift of non-standard English usage from Vladek to the hitchhiker (131).

On the one hand, Maus celebrates English by showing it as mastering and dominating what it confronts. “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” (132).

However, on the other hand, Maus shows the limitations of English as a 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 reposition 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.
(132)

Work Cited

Alan C. Rosen. “The Language of Survival:
English as Metaphor in Art Spiegelman’s Maus”. In Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust. Edited by Deborah R. Geis. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama, 2003, pp.122-134.

 

Transcribed Selections from Art Spiegelman's 2014 Interview with Neil Gaiman

by Corry Shores
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Transcribed Selections from

Art Spiegelman & Neil Gaiman

“Neil Gaiman in Conversation with Art Spiegelman”
[Public Interview]

April 4, 2014
Sosnoff Theater
The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Bard College
https://youtu.be/wCG9XjqKkqI

https://youtu.be/wCG9XjqKkqI

Transcribed Selections

[Gaiman and Spiegelman discuss family trees and how whole branches were eliminated in the concentration camps. Spiegelman mentions how he met with a cousin who did a genealogy of their family.]

Spiegelman:

The family in 1938 and the family in 1946. And it was the same thing, but with blank boxes everywhere. Nobody was left in 1946, just one little branch that included him and me, because cousins were really the same as brothers and sisters after the war. The only family you could find were through several steps of remove. I reproduced that diagram in MetaMaus over two spreads, and it still chokes me up in a way that the book so does not, because I have had to be so clinical about making Maus.
[from around 36.00 to 38.00]

[Gaiman then asks where did the original idea of the three-page Maus story in Funny Animals come from. Spiegelman’s answer largely reproduces what is explained in Metamaus, pages 111-114. Then he adds:]

Spiegelman:

Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer” came to mind, which is a metaphor of the Jews as mice, and allowed what became that three page story to happen.
[around 40.10]

[Gaiman then talks about his cousin who is a Holocaust professor and survivor herself.]

Gaiman:

[She] hates Maus. And I got to listen to her tell me why she hated it, for five minutes, of going, “it is ridiculous, it portrays the Jews as mice,” and so on and so forth; “it is a cartoon.” And she got to the end of that, and she started telling me something else. And two minutes into that, she started telling me how the Nazis called us rodents, and they said “we were subhuman.” And she completely failed to see that the two lined up, absolutely.

Spiegelman:

Well, I certainly have gotten a lot of heat from Poles about drawing them as pigs. The Jews are so long suffering and so used to being put down, that I have hardly ever heard that particular response, you know? But also, because of the way the book is structured, these are self-destructing metaphors. They are metaphors that are meant to fall apart. There is a place in one little scene where a Jewish guy who is with a German woman, and they have a kid, and the kid is like a mouse with cat stripes on it. It is not meant to be taken as literal that they are different species. Or when my father is wandering around Poland, he is wearing a Woolworth pig mask that has strings hanging off the back. Some of the Poles behave really well, some behave badly. Some of the Jews behave well, some behave badly. So that in a number of places in the book, that particular metaphor, you are asked to let it dissolve. And it just allows actually something really important, which is the Little Orphan Annie’s Eyeball Effect to take place. I always found Little Orphan Annie a lot more emotionally evocative than say Little Abner, with a much more exaggerated drawing style, because here we are asked to project the expression and ultimately the face through these blank pieces of paper that were inside those oval eyeballs. And so it allows somebody to become more specific by you doing the work of finding that specific person. And I think if I was off on a search for verisimilitude, I would collapse in five seconds. I do not know what these Polish people looked like. I do not know what Vladek’s friend looked like. There is no photo reference to go to. And just by having a mouse-mask, it was just, you project the face, I will just give you the body gestures as if it were some kind of Japanese Noh Theater or something.
[around 40.00 to 43.10]

[[We will first address the notion of the animal forms as being “self-destructing metaphors.”  In another interview, he says, “I tend to think of it as humans with animal heads” (1991 UWTV interview). Note also in this interview, even the mouse heads he calls masks (“And just by having a mouse-mask…”). He has portrayed himself as having such a mask before. Consider for example these panels from MetaMaus.

In MetaMaus, in the chapter “Why Mice?”,  Spiegelman further discusses this notion of the characters wearing masks. So the mice are humans wearing masks, and then at times they wear pig masks over their mouse masks.

Below we see the comparison of Little Orphan Annie’s and Li’l Abner’s faces. He says in the 1991 TV interview:

do you know of Little Orphan Annie? These big discs for eyes? Well, you look into these blank eyes, and you get to a sheet of paper very quickly, and on that sheet of paper you project an expression. And it is much more evocative than a lot of other comics for me as a result, because the expressiveness is there because of your participation. And the animal heads are relatively neutral, relatively blank, and they ask for you to project Anja, Vladek, me, and whatever, into that work and thereby draw you deeper into the actuality of what happened, that somehow the animals offer a defamiliarization of the experience.
(1991 UWTV interview)

Finally in the panel below we notice flexibility of the masks or animal forms with the hybrid child, who has both a mouse mask and cat stripes.

]]

Spiegelman:

For me comics are an art of compression. […] …what comics do so well. They are an abbreviated form of writing and an abbreviated form of drawing, closer, as I think James Stern who has this comics school up in Vermont put it, comics are not about drawing and writing, they are about graphic design and poetry. […] It is not about illustration, exactly. The visual compression is part of its power, and not everything should be a three hundred page story. If I could draw better, Maus would be have been 2000 pages. It is a compressed 300 pages, and it took 13 years to compress.
[around 57.15 to around 58.20]

Gaiman:

For me, the power of comics is the point when you can go silent. What I miss the most about writing novels is silent panels, because in a comic I can actually have a character stop talking for a moment and just have a beat, just one of those blank panels. And you cannot do that in a novel. You have to say something. Even if you say, “he did not say something for a moment,” you just said something. You broke that silence. And the glory of comics is especially of things that are happening silence, then the reader brings herself to what is going on, to the image and has to decide what is happening, how people feel, and I love that. So for me, just because I have written “no dialogue” underneith a panel description does not make it any less [… overtalk].

Spiegelman:

All those silent movies were written. Someone had to write them, and not just the intertitles. It is built in.
[from 1.26.15 to around 1.27.25]

Art Spiegelman & Neil Gaiman. “Neil Gaiman in Conversation with Art Spiegelman”. [Public Interview]. April 4, 2014. Sosnoff Theater.
The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Bard College. Available on youtube:
https://youtu.be/wCG9XjqKkqI