Control In Maus I And Maus II By Art Spiegelman
The word itself often has negative connotations and brings to mind dictators holding trophies and cackling evilly. And yet it doesn’t entirely have to mean that; in fact, it can mean the smallest bit of power over a situation. In the novels Maus I and Maus II, by Art Spiegelman, control plays a huge role in the plot and in the message. By showing characters who find even the littlest bit of power they have and use it to their advantage, the novels evoke the idea that the ability to find and use this control is critically important to survival; however, it also brings up the thought that this ability can be harmful and destructive. As a whole, Spiegelman tells his readers that as long as one keeps a healthy balance of control, it can save one’s life.
Throughout these two histories, control can often be found in the most unlikely of places. This is especially true when Vladek, the main character and Art’s father, finds himself in a horrible place that seems like it can only end in doom. For example, when his wife Anja goes through a mental breakdown and they both end up moving to a sanitarium for her health, he tells “her many jokes and stories to keep her busy”, finding the only thing he can do for her and doing it. He is able to find something he can do, even when it seems as if there is no hope. Later on, in the very beginning of the war, Vladek shoots a man in self-defense. While he quite obviously cannot revive the man, he can get him help from the Nazis, and he does. Vladek puts it briefly, saying that “at least I did something”. While neither of these circumstances or many like them actually end up doing anything monumental, they do demonstrate Vladek’s remarkable ability to discern his areas of control and use them.
Later on, this ability proves critical in Vladek’s survival. This ability soon becomes essential. Without it, Vladek might have starved or died, although a great deal of luck played into his survival as well. At one point in his journey, he comes across a situation that seems unsolvable. He needs to present his shirt clean and free of lice in order to get soup, the only food he gets. However, lice is everywhere, and he has no time to wash his shirt before every meal. Yet Vladek finds a way around this, too; he bargains for another shirt of someone else’s and cleans, dries, and protects it. When he shows this shirt, “right away they gave me to eat”. He is able to eat only because of this remarkable, ingenious ability to find control. A while later, after he has escaped from Auschwitz, he again finds control in a situation that seems impossible to control, where he and many other Jews are surrounded by Germans, who plan to shoot them. They are near a lake, and so Vladek suggests that they try to swim in the lake, but not yet; “we can always try it when the shooting starts”, Vladek says. By finding a solution, they are able to relax a little, and they don’t attack the Nazis. This is likely part of how they survive; while the Germans luckily disappear overnight, others died when retaliating. It isn’t just Vladek who is able to exercise control.
Art himself, by writing these novels, is exercising the only power he has over his own situation. Art feels powerless about the Holocaust, because he can’t go back in time and stop it, and he can’t make it better. He doesn’t quite know how to deal with it, so he finds the only control he has, in his writing. When he’s discussing this with his therapist Pavel, Pavel mentions that “look how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What’s the point? People haven’t changed…”. Pavel implies that we write about the Holocaust not only to understand it, like Art seems to do, but also to try to change human nature. Art seems to agree, which leads to the understanding that Art knows that people haven’t changed, but he writes Maus anyway. He clearly has little to no belief that he has any control at all over what will happen. However, he forges ahead anyway, in a sort of “do what I can” attitude. For him, it’s more about duty than an actual belief in what he is doing. He almost NEEDS to find something he can do, so he does. However, this urgency can turn into a dark world, as it does with both Anja and Vladek later in their lives. Art calls Vladek “just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew”. This is mainly because Vladek controls Art immensely, from pulling his son to fix things to throwing away Art’s coat and giving his own old coat, saying that “I got at a store a NEW jacket, and I can give to you my old one; it’s still like new!”. He doesn’t care that Art doesn’t want a new coat; he needs to control something, so he controls his son since Art is the only one he can control. This is a perfect example of control going much too far since although control can help in some situations, complete control and unnecessary control are not useful in most circumstances.
In fact, Richieu dies because his caretaker, Tosha, needed to be the controller of her own life; she says “I won’t go to their gas chambers!. . . and my children won’t go to their gas chambers” just before she poisons herself and Richieu and her own children. It is not certain if Richieu would have lived had she not done this, but by exercising this complete control over her life and the children’s she cuts off that chance completely. This same scenario repeats itself in Anja’s life, for when Anja commits suicide, it is a final act of control. The problem then emerges that it is incredibly difficult to find a balance between the control that can save a life and the control that leads to destroying a life.
Depressingly, Spiegelman suggests that this balance may not be possible. The only solution to this difficult balancing act, the reader can infer, is to use judgment as to when to use this ability and when to refrain from using it. For example, Vladek needs to control his situation however he can when he's in Auschwitz, but if he used his judgment when trying to control his son, the relationship between Art and his father could have been a very different one. Art seems to intuitively demonstrate what the ideal scenario is, by both knowing when he can control things and knowing when to stop. With his father, Art is able to look at a situation when his father is trying to control him and find ways to benefit himself while still not making his father as upset as e would be if Art just refused to do whatever Vladek wanted him to do.
A proverb that exactly demonstrates what Art is able to do is the proverb “pick and choose your battles. ” A perfect example of when Art does this is when he and his father are going to the grocery store and Vladek wants Art to go in and return half-eaten groceries. Art tells him “[no that’s disgusting]” and refuses, but tells Vladek that he should go do it himself. He picks the battle that he feels is necessary to argue on (Art doing it) but doesn’t fight with Vladek, since there is no harm in making Vladek do it himself. By balancing what he controls and what he knows is pointless in controlling, he gets the best scenario. This balance of control is exceedingly difficult to find.
However, Spiegelman does offer some ideas on how to find it for oneself. By showing his readers different people and how they balance control, he makes the point that this balance will be different for everyone. Like many other things, one must find it for oneself. There is no right answer, Spiegelman suggests, except that the only way to find this balance is to uncover it by working out what works, what doesn’t, and why. Perhaps this balance can never be truly found, but, as Art does, one must work to get as close as possible to that goal.
