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Author
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Topic: Santayana Wasn't Kidding (January 2002)
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Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 01-19-2002 08:26 PM
   
The January Comics update is now online. |
Kevin Ott
True Believer
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posted 01-19-2002 08:27 PM
Dave managed to point out things about Maus that I haven’t been able to put into words myself – like Vladek’s disagreeable nature in the face of the author’s own negative attitude. Speigelman as a character struck me as an almost interminable whiner, and I wonder how self-conscious he was of that fact when he was writing it. For me, that was a sign that the echoes of Hitler’s Germany are still ringing today, even in small ways that we might not consider as direct results.I often wondered at his choice of animals to represent nationalities. While I agree that none of the animal representations directly mirrored any potential traits of their respective ethnicities, I’m not sure that I can blame a Polish person for being a bit miffed at the Poles’ portrayal as pigs. Now, whether in the confines of that story and its narrative point of view that portrayal carries with it any reflection of reality is a different argument altogether. All in all, I don’t think it’s a big deal – I certainly don’t mind being portrayed as a goofy golden retriever – but since Speigelman set up the situation initially as one in which animals represented sides of a dispute and the roles of the dramatis personae, I don’t think it’s unfair to make him answer a few questions about why he made the choices he made. My big question: Why reindeer for the Swedes? One thing that drove Dave’s point about Santayana’s "those who forget history" quote home for me was the interaction between Vladek Speigelman and a black man who Art and his significant other had picked up. In the story, Vladek had reprimanded the younger couple for offering a ride to a "shvarster" as he called the man, saying that black people can’t be trusted. Speigelman’s girlfriend (whose name I can’t recall) berates Vladek, saying that he of all people should be cognizant of the evils of racism. More than anything else, that part of the book makes me wonder if we shouldn’t just turn the planet over to the real dogs and cats and mice. |
Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 01-19-2002 08:28 PM
First, let me say that if Spiegelman were trying to make some clever or derogatory point about the ethnic groups in his books, surely he would have done something with the French. Even though I consider myself a liberal, sometimes the thought police make me want to hurl.Since I have not had a chance to pick up Maus or Palestine, I'm going to have to speak slightly off the subject here until I do. Even if the author's of these books did not intend for their stories to resonate with each other's in the way that do, if you believe in the power of the written word, you certainly hope that anything you write (even a message board post at 1:30 in the morning) is going to literally strike a chord with someone, that they can bounce off someone else, and so on . . . The great tragedy in all of this is, the connection between what the Jews experienced in Eastern Europe and what they do to others in Palestine is not obvious to a lot of people. Most people don’t make connections between their own actions and the actions of others. They really do live in vacuums to a certain extent. It's ironic - artists are the people that are least likely to fall victim to this - given the fact that they need to leave themselves "open" looking for these connections to make and transfer to their art. Isn't it funny that they're the ones that are most often written off as "flaky" and "undependable"?
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Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 01-23-2002 02:44 AM
quote:
Originally posted by Kevin Ott:
but since Speigelman set up the situation initially as one in which animals represented sides of a dispute and the roles of the dramatis personae, I don’t think it’s unfair to make him answer a few questions about why he made the choices he made. My big question: Why reindeer for the Swedes?
And in fairness, Spiegelman does try to tackle these questions a little bit within the story. During the passages where he talks about the pressure he feels trying to finish the book, he discusses his difficulty in finding a representation for the French. (He eventually settled on frogs.) In the course of that, he talks about he didn't intend the metaphors to be taken very literally, and that in many ways beyond the cats and mice, it was merely a gimmick. It's one of those moments where the meta-commentary becomes very interesting, and where I'm glad it's so relatively easy for comics artists to 'break the fourth wall.' |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 09-09-2002 01:52 AM
I've discovered a bit of an interesting phenomenon. I occasionally will take the things I write about a book or movie or what-have-you here at the site and rewrite it into a short review for Amazon. (Gotta share the wealth, ya know.) I did one for Palestine, and while I don't think I said anything too incendiary, it's clearly the most polarizing of the blurbs I've written. 33 people have 'voted' on it, and 16 found it 'helpful.' I can't help but wonder how much that's a comment on my reviewing skills and how much it's a comment on the politics of the issue. | |
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