Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer 2005 | Page 71

Satirical Irony in Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale 67 ^ C lick’s rejection o f historical causality is problematic and may be unsettling for some readers. My own work tends to be historicist in nature, and thus I have difficulty accepting this line o f thinking wliolesale. However, I find ^izek’s underlying warning compelling. We must be careful, he insists, not to buy into the notion that history is simply the past that makes the present. Rather, he argues throughout his many works that the present always makes the past that, in turn, makes the present. ^ Z i^ k finds it reprehensible that in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler's List the director ascribes complex psychological motives to the villain in a scene where a Nazi officer has an affair with a Jewish girl: “The fact [is] that the scene presents a (psychologically) impossible position o f enunciation o f its subject: it expresses his split attitude towards the terrified Jewish girl as his direct psychological self-experience.'^ In other words, Spielberg depicts