I've been surprised, in reading Mauss, what a non-issue the whole mouse thing has been for me. When I first found out about mouse as a kid, it seemed so gimmicky, and to be honest, my first reading of it was cursory enough that the gimmickyness stayed with me. This time around, I guess I didn't really notice that the characters were mice past the first ten pages or so. What I do notice (and have trouble with) is the characterization of other peoples as other animals (Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, etc). When I first saw the Pole depicted as pig, I was pretty shocked, and it still makes me feel uncomfortable, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
My feelings hear are harder to express than I thought they might be. Growing up, what was emphasized over and over again was the fact that Jews really worry often a real part of the culture in their home countries. Certainly not so much in Poland as in Germany, but even there, the rudeness of the shock, the perceived rejection by their own countryman, the people they had served with in war and celebratedwith in life, was what stung Jewish folks even before the brutal murder began. I feel like the depiction of the Jews, Germans and Poles as different "species" is incongruous with this historical fact, and that makes me sad.
I kind of wonder on the whole whether it would have been better if Speigleman had just made everybody mice. I guess some folks would say that this not having the different factions be different animals would defeat the purpose of doing it with animals at all, but I don't think this is so. For me, the whole mouse thing is about getting a little bit of distance from a story many of us have heard over and over again. The mouse thing makes it almost the story of the Holocaust, but also something else. This sort of titling or skewing gives us a way into the complexities of a story that is often impenetrable, which I find immensely exciting, particularly as a Jewish kid who has often found herself dissatisfied by the orchestrated blare and hush that defines modern Jewish discourse around this part of our history.
1 comment:
I agree that, at times, the idea of different "species" gave me issues. I think the point you bring up about the "rejection by their own countrymen" is an important one, but one that is perhaps answered by the use of masks? The fact that the differences are only in the masks (and at times, the mouse tails) seems to suggest that these are personas they've taken on or had thrust upon them, not necessarily who they are underneath. Ultimately, the use of the mask strings solved a lot of the issues I had with the animal metaphors, as did Spiegelman's very honest relation of his own issues with the style--it accomplished more for my interpretation of the reading than not.
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