Maus: A Graphic Oral Tradition

Graphic novels seem to effectively translate the stories told between generations. Studies on ancient cultures like the Greeks and Romans, whose poets and bards memorized and recited exceptionally long passages for public entertainment, used a pictorial method of memorization. We see in our everyday lives how the use of pictures can help us to understand and remember events which took place before our birth or beyond personal experience. It is for this reason Maus has become a much lauded account of the Holocaust despite the depiction of humans as various animals.

Perhaps another reason Spiegleman's work is so effective may be from the primitive intuitiveness in the way it reads. There are no rules as to which square precedes the next, making the reader put the story together using his or her own understanding of the way the book should read. Vladek too, does not exactly speak in perfect chronological fashion. Often times he must venture in reverse to capture details he missed in the first telling of an event. As a result, the feeling of oral tradition is preserved both through Vladek's narration and in the way the book is pieced together by the reader. I'm sure a careful analysis of the way each person reads and interprets Spiegleman's story would likely yield a different result each time due to the work the reader does in receiving the ideas from the book.