Out of Kansas

Out of Kansas

I find it on the high bookshelf—Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. I’ve heard about it. It’s about the Holocaust. Mice play the Jews, and cats play the German Nazis. I understand it already. Cats are predators to mice. That’s easy enough. I start reading. The Polish people are pigs. Wait a minute, I don’t get it. Why are they pigs? I’m getting confused. I want to give up. Instead, I pick it up and start again.

We begin as moody troubleshooters: we see a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit—we either chop off a corner or throw the thing away.

What is a stereotype besides a way of grouping things in order to understand them in a complete and perfectly organized way? To say that something didn’t fit would be an admission that we are unsure of the world we are living in—a frightening thought. Further, we are often conditioned through art to recognize these stereotypes without thought and to react identically as a community—a means of creating and controlling an ideal society. Theater theorist and playwright Bertolt Brecht says of European theater, “It is well known that contact between audience and stage is normally made on the basis of empathy” (136). The goal is often to make audiences identify with the characters and the stories so that they will reach a natural state of controlled catharsis at the end. Many audiences have thus learned to expect and enjoy such a style.

Audiences seek art that will pick them up and pull them along for the entire ride. Underground comic, illustrator, and magazine editor Art Spiegelman meets that desire in his novel-sized comic Maus. Spiegelman describes his work: “The goal was to get people moving forward, to get my eye and thought organized enough so that one could relatively, seamlessly, be able to become absorbed in the narrative” (Jun 10). A story that absorbs the audience into its own unslowing whirlwind sounds a lot like Brecht’s description of the cathartic theater of control. However, Spiegelman’s works haven’t always had the same goal. In his early career, the question that motivated his art was, “How many obstacles could you put in somebody’s path before the reader just caved in and couldn’t handle it anymore?” (Juno, 8). The goal was to stilt catharsis—to kill it in its tracks in order to provoke active thought. I read his 1972 comic strip “Skinless Perkins.