Satirical Irony in Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor^s Tale
61
notes that the “hyperbole of the animal imagery . . . [defends] the viewer against
(or prevent[s]) an unbearable (or voyeuristic) access to the banal human forms
of evil and abjection” (93). Yet Mitchell’s astute comments do not help us
understand the form that Spiegelman’s hyperbole takes. I want to consider how
Spiegelman’s hyperbolic animal imagery functions in conceptualizing satire
through the ironic appropriation of Nazi propaganda and the attendant danger of
such an appropriation.
Both Books One and Two are epigraphically framed by Nazi
propaganda. The first book begins with a quote from Hitler—“The Jews are
undoubtedly a race, but they are not human”—while the second begins with a
quote from a German newspaper that deplores the supposed Jewish idealization
of Mickey Mouse. Both quotes function as a form of satirical irony by referring
explicitly to the uses of anthropomorphism in Maus. If the Jews are not human,
Spiegelman asks, then wiiat is it like to imagine a world in wliich the Germans,
the Poles, the French, and everyone else are not depicted as human either?
Indeed, Spiegelman is part of a tradition in which subjugated groups, as James
Young points out, have “appropriated the racial epithets and stereotypes used
against them in order to ironize and thereby neutralize their charge, taking them
out of the oppressors’ vocabulary” (36). Spiegelman goes further, however, by
mobilizing all of the stereotypes, rhetorical tropes, and images associated with
the Holocaust.
For some readers, perhaps, depicting the Holocaust in cartoon figures
runs the risk of trivializing atrocity insofar as the Nazi’s themselves conceived
of Jews as nonhuman and, further, subjected them to ironic treatment. The
depiction of Jews as nonhuman was part of the vast Nazi state apparatus that
transformed German moral responsibility for their deaths into a moral
responsibility for their elimination.^ Zizek points out that the Nazis “first
brutally reduced the Jews to the subhuman level and then presented this image
as the proof of their subhumanity” (78). Hitler did not simply engage in
rhetorical declarations that the Jews were nonhuman. He understood that words
alone were not enough and that by deploying verbal and imagistic rhetoric
together he could produce meanings that any one medium could not. The totality
of the two mediums successfully established Jewish subhumanity. By filming
the Jews in the very ghettos that the Nazis created for them and then circulating
these images as “proof’ that Jews were not human and more akin to vermin.
Hitler’s regime made mass extermination acceptable to various publics (Zizek
63). The images of Jews as nonhuman naturalized an ideological construction
and interpellated the German population as morally bound to fulfill their
obligations in exterminating the infestation.
The graphic novel form might thus be thought of as closely associated
with the two mediums drawn on by the Nazis insofar as it relies on the
text/image conju