“Well Intended Liberal Slop” Allegories of Race in Spiegelman's Maus

Journal of American Studies/AMSAdditional services for Journal of AmericanStudies:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click here“Well Intended Liberal Slop”: Allegories of Race in Spiegelman's MausANDREW LOMANJournal of American Studies / Volume 40 / Issue 03 / December 2006, pp 551 - 571DOI: 10.1017/S002187580600212X, Published online: 22 November 2006Link to this article: /abstract_S002187580600212X How to cite this article:ANDREW LOMAN (2006). “Well Intended Liberal Slop”: Allegories of Race in Spiegelman's Maus. Journal of American Studies, 40, pp 551-571 doi:10.1017/S002187580600212XRequest Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from /AMS, IP address: 157.182.150.22 on 19 Jul 2015‘‘Well Intended Liberal Slop’’:Allegories of Race in Spiegelman’s MausANDREW LOMANIn a 1992interview,Art Spiegelman described the genealogy of Maus ,his acclaimed comic-book treatment of the Holocaust.He was inspired to write Maus ,he stated,when asked to contribute to a commix anthology called Funny Aminals ;the only restriction on his creativity was that the story must somehow involve anthropomorphized animals.‘‘At the time I was trying to figure this out,’’Spiegelman reports,I went to sit in on some classes of a friend of mine,Ken Jacobs,a filmmaker and very wonderful teacher at SUNY Binghamton,who was showing some old animated cartoons in his class with cats and mice romping around,and then he was showing some racist cartoons from the same period,and it became clear that there was a connection between the two,that Al Jolson was Mickey Mouse without the ears.1At that point I said,‘‘I have it:I’ll do a comic-book story about the Ku Klux Kats,and a lynching of some mice,and deal with racism in America using cats and mice as the vehicle.’’And that lasted about ten minutes before I realized that I just didn’t have enough background and knowledge to make this thing happen well,that it would just come across as well intended liberal slop.And instantly the synapses connected,and I realized that I had a metaphor of oppression much closer to my own past in the Nazi Project.2(Spiegelman CD-ROM)Andrew Loman is a Lecturer at Memorial University of Newfoundland,Canada.1Spiegelman’s linkage of Jolson and Mickey Mouse is not gratuitous.In an early Mickey Mouse short,The Jazz Fool (1929),based on Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer ,the link between Mickey and minstrelsy ostentatiously displays itself.The problematic representation of race in the entire Disney oeuvre has increasingly come to be a topic in scholarship.Many of these critiques,however,start not with the jazz-fool Mickey Mouse but with Disney’s recourse to stereotypes of the African-American in the cartoon (Jim)crows of Dumbo (1949),or the 1946Disney version of the Joel Chandler Harris tales,Song of the South .See Eleanor Byrne and Michael McQuillan,Deconstructing Disney (London:Pluto Press,1999),94–110for a general discussion of Disney and race;for race in Song of the South see Russo (1992);and Snead (1994).2Thomas Doherty is therefore wrong to argue that the ‘‘pivotal inspiration for Spiegelman’s cat and mouse gamble was the visual stereotypes of Third Reich symbology,the hackwork Journal of American Studies ,40(2006),3,551–571f 2006Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S002187580600212X Printed in the United Kingdom552Andrew LomanWhat emerged from this moment of inspired translation was a three-page ur-Maus for Funny Aminals that Spiegelman subsequently enlarged into the two-volume Maus.This larger version is a magisterial reconstruction of one person’s experience of the Holocaust that evolves out of conversations be-tween Spiegelman and his father Vladek,a survivor.The book is an elaborate allegory which represents Jews as mice,Germans as cats,Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs,and so on.What interests me in this reconstruction of the books’genealogy is how powerful a phrase‘‘well intended liberal slop’’is,and how neatly it justifies the translation of the cat-and-mouse metaphor from the American context to the European.We are accustomed to the negative connotations attributed to the term‘‘liberal’’from right and left alike,and,still more,are acutely aware of the political and ethical implications of representing alterity. Debates on these implications have been common currency in literary studies since Edward Said’s publication of Orientalism in1978at the latest.But Spiegelman’s decision not directly to represent the African–American ex-perience of racism in light of his insight carries its own ethical risks.In effect, Spiegelman acknowledges what Jacobs has perceived:twentieth-century American mass culture in the form of Disney cartoons and their like has encoded aspects of racist entertainments that originated in the nineteenth century.He has the further insight that the cat-and-mouse cartoon(more broadly,the animal cartoon)may allegorize particularly American race re-lations.But Spiegelman then elides the distinctively American tenor of the metaphor and substitutes the Holocaust.The sophistication and power of the result is beyond refuting.The ethical terrain that Maus enters in effecting this translation is full of its own pitfalls,however,because although Spiegelman derives inspiration from a particular symbology that demands critique,he then fails to undertake that critique,and even to some degree disguises the metaphor’s specifically American origins.Especially since his sense of the cat-and-mouse metaphor derives from a specifically American context,uprooting the metaphor–understanding that dyad as a vehicle that will travel–means that the cultural oppression of African Americans that from the mephistoes at Goebbels’s Reichsministry and Julius Streicher’s venomous weekly Der Sturmer–the anti-Semitic broadsheets and editorial cartoons depicting Jews as hook-nosed,beady-eyed Untermenschen,creatures whose ferret faces and rodent snouts marked them as human vermin’’(1996,74).Unquestionably the Third Reich symbology Doherty describes makes the‘‘cat and mouse gamble’’effective.But the pivotal inspiration for Maus was the visual stereotypes of American popular culture;what makes the translation of themetaphor from America to Europe aesthetically,thematically,and politically effective is that cartoons of the kind Doherty mentions shared their symbology with American car-toons of the period.Well Intended Liberal Slop553 Spiegelman demystifies as afirst step towards Maus is at risk of becoming mystified anew.Although to my mind Maus both registers and at least partially resolves the ethical problems of transplanting the metaphor,the metaphor’s American genealogy nevertheless demands much more attention than it has received to date.The position I take in the article that follows–that the two volumes of Maus engage with the issue of race in America in spite of their focus on Nazi Germany–deserves to be challenged by other critics.(One might note,for instance,that Spiegelman’s engagement with this topic is so subtle that to date it has been overlooked by the books’many critics,and thus may well be rhetorically ineffective.)The specifically American origins of the racial caricatures need to become a permanent feature of critical en-gagement with the two books.3IFor many reasons,the translation of the cat-and-mouse metaphor from America to Nazi Germany succeeds brilliantly.As Spiegelman’s research incontrovertibly bears out,in many instances Nazi propagandists rep-resented Jews as mice or rats,claiming thereby that the Jewish presence in Europe was an infestation of vermin that needed to be wiped out.And there are various grotesque ironies that Spiegelman noted in the course of his research;for instance,Zyklon B,the poison used in the gas chambers,was first developed as a pesticide.4A specific connection between Mickey Mouse 3For instance,a statement like the following(from Geoffrey Hartman’s brief allusion to Maus in The Longest Shadow;1996,53–54)must be challenged and subtilized:‘‘Maus and Maus II blend the folkloric beast-fable with American popular cartoons in order to retell the story of his survivor parents,together with its effect on him.Spiegelman’s comic-book style is not a simple alienation effect;it mirrors the vision of an adult who becomes a childagain as he attempts to absorb extreme knowledge.The cartoons serve as a transitional object helping us toward a difficult truth–though not as innocent an object as it used to be.For they recall the Nazi representation of Jews as rodents as well as our own uneasy conscience about the‘lower’orders of creation we both slaughter and promote to comic strip immortality,such as Mickey Mouse,Bugs Bunny,Miss Piggy,Elsie,etc.’’Although Hartman’s insight is legitimate(chapter2of the second volume makes the connection between‘‘lower’’orders and‘‘us’’explicit),it nevertheless distinguishes‘‘us’’morally from the Nazis by distinguishing between the Nazis’representations of Jews and‘‘our’’rep-resentations of animals,‘‘orders of creation’’that may or may not be‘‘lower’’but at least are not human.In so doing,Hartman supposes a moral distinction between Nazi and American cartoons that Spiegelman presumably would not altogether embrace,making the latter cartoons relatively benign when they are in fact much more complex,even compromised.4Chapter3of volume II(‘‘Time Flies’’)makes use of this grim historical detail.Following Vladek’s devastating account of the gas chambers,Franc¸oise and Art retire outside,but554Andrew Lomanand the Jew was even made for Spiegelman in his research:Maus II’s epi-graph comes from a German newspaper article of the mid-1930s that states, Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed_.Healthy emotions tellevery independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty andfilth-covered vermin,the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom,cannot be the ideal type of animal_.Away with the Jewish brutalization of the people!Down with Mickey Mouse!Wear the Swastika cross!5Racist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic used bestialization as a trope, and there clearly exist continuities between Nazi anti-Semitism and American anti-black racism in the1930s.It is no doubt because of these continuities that the metaphor translates so brilliantly to the European con-text;the nature of Nazi racial caricatures justifies Spiegelman in claiming that he was writing‘‘alongside Hitler,’’appropriating Nazi racial discourses and subverting them.That these similarities are stark is not in itself a justification for abandoning the American contexts,however,and it is not a foregone conclusion that Spiegelman’s hypothetical investigation of racism in the American context would be‘‘well intended liberal slop.’’Spiegelman’s argument that he lacked ‘‘the background and knowledge’’to write on the experience of race in America implies that he is somehow exempt from that American experience. What Spiegelman presumably means is that he lacks an understanding of American racism from the point of view of one of its direct victims–that is, from the African American perspective–and his caution about representing the African American experience is praiseworthy.But to assume that be-cause he is not African American he could not adequately write about American racism would be true,I submit,only if he were to fail to theorize his own relationship with American race relations.That is,if he were to strike a weak and sentimental pose,expressing sympathy for the African-American mouse and condemning the Euro-American cat while not investigating his own position in the allegory,then whatever he produced would be‘‘liberal slop.’’Taking the opposite tack would evidently alter matters.6find,in the evening air,that‘‘bugs are eating[them]alive’’(II,74).Art sprays a pesticide, and bugs fall dead at his feet.These bugs visually recall ones at the beginning of the chapter (II,41),where Art is sitting at his desk,swarmed byflies,and atop a pile of dead Jewish mice.5The epigraph to Maus II is less simple when one reads Mickey Mouse in light of Al Jolson.In a sense,the epigraph is misleading because it suggests a confrontation between America and Nazi Germany when that relationship was–at least at the level of their racial caricatures–in fact more complex.6In a1997article in Mother Jones,Spiegelman explored what he called his‘‘inner racist.’’Spiegelman reflects on the origins of the‘‘racist virus’’that led his four-year-old sonWell Intended Liberal Slop555 Spiegelman’s lack of intimate background is a problematic justification for avoiding the treatment of American race relations partly because a similar lack of experience becomes an aesthetic resource in Maus.In the second volume of Maus,Art describes the difficulties he experienced in trying to write about the Holocaust,making his account of these difficulties a partial resolution of them.These difficulties have to do with his distance from the Holocaust:he knows of it through his parents rather than fromfirst-hand experience,and he is a second-generation survivor,in that although born after the war,he lives with his parents’ongoing trauma(one of the most powerful moments in Maus is Spiegelman’s account of his mother’s suicide in the1960s).Representing the Holocaust–making sense of it–is something that Spiegelman wrestles with throughout both volumes.‘‘I can’t even make any sense out of my relationship with my father_,’’his mouse persona says in an exchange with his wife Franc¸oise early in the second volume;‘‘How am I supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz?_of the Holocaust?’’(II, 14).7Presently,he records a fantasy borne of the imagination’s inability to come to terms with the Holocaust:‘‘I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through!_I guess it’s some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did’’(II,14). The imagination is incommensurate with experience,he argues. Spiegelman does not suppose that in hearing a survivor’s testimony he is any closer to having an authentic encounter with the Holocaust.He insists throughout on the insufficiency of his father’s narrative to communicate the reality of the Holocaust to him,and of testimony to function as a Dashiell to declare that he didn’t like black people,ultimately admitting that‘‘the insular world of our intimate circle’’includes‘‘very few black people’’and declaring,perhaps a little ostentatiously,that he himself had once used a racial epithet.The rhetorical moves inthis short article are complex.Spiegelman verbally assaulted an orderly while recovering from a breakdown in‘‘a state mental hospital,’’a circumstance that might or might not mitigate his culpability for the racist outburst.‘‘A couple of months after I was released from the mental hospital,’’he records,‘‘Martin Luther King Jr.was assassinated.I took no responsibility for it;I was crazy,but not that crazy!’’But Spiegelman implies that he retainsa sense of guilty complicity with King’s assassin,just as,in Maus,he admits feeling re-sponsible for the suicide of his mother(which also took place several months after his release from the hospital;see Maus I,100–3).7For all direct quotations from Maus,I have adopted the following(somewhat eccentric) format:I have indicated all Spiegelman’s emphases in the text,either with italics or with bold text;where the same character speaks in separate speech balloons within a panel,I have used a single slash(/)to denote the break,and when the same character speaks in separate panels,I have used a double slash(//)to denote the break.Although this format is strange to the eyes,it has the virtue of being faithful to the text and attentive to the nuances of panel arrangement.556Andrew Loman(conventionally)reliable historical document.In one instance,Art’s father Vladek tells him about marching through the gates of Auschwitz every day (Figure1;see Appendix).Art interrupts to tell Vladek about his recent re-search:‘‘I just read about the camp orchestra that played as you marched out the gate_,’’he says.Vladek is mystified:‘‘No.I remember only marching, not any orchestras_From the gate guards took us over to the workshop. How could it be there an orchestra?’’(II,54).Spiegelman brilliantly resolves the inconsistency between Vladek’s memory and the documentary record through his visual representation of the scene at the camp gates:in one panel the mice are marching past the gates with the orchestra in view behind them; in the next the marchers have almost entirely obscured the orchestra(only the head of the conductor and some of the instruments remain visible).The two panels emphasize the role of perspective in Maus:the narrative is Spiegelman’s transcription of his father’s belated reconstruction of the Holocaust;that is to say,it is the inexact copy of an idiosyncratic experience. As such,although scrupulously researched,Maus specifically does not pretend to offer more than a glimpse of the Holocaust itself.Spiegelman emphasizes the limitations of Vladek’s perspective throughout by raising the status of Anja’s memories of the Holocaust as a central issue in the book.Anja,as Art discovers,wrote her own Holocaust memoirs;throughout thefirst volume of Maus he attempts to gain access to these memoirs.When hefirst hears from Vladek about their existence,he exclaims,‘‘Ohmigod!Where are they?I need those for this book!’’(I,84).Vladek persistently vacillates until finally he admits to having destroyed them following Anja’s suicide.For Art this destruction of the memoirs is tantamount to murder,and his response is all the more intense because Vladek admits that Anja wanted Art to read them as an adult.Vladek’s act of destruction means that a(feminine)account that corrects,supplements,or corroborates his own(masculine)recollection of the Holocaust is unavailable to his son;Spiegelman’s insistence on this destruction makes Anja’s missing account a critical absence in Maus.8As various critics have pointed out,the insistence on the provisional nature of representation in Maus reflects Spiegelman’s familiarity with debates on Holocaust representation more generally.9These debates orig-inate with Theodor Adorno’s famous contention that after Auschwitz,art is barbaric–that is,that representation threatens to trivialize the Holocaust or,worse still,transmute it into a form from which one can derive aesthetic 8For the best discussion of Anja Spiegelman’s powerful absence in Maus see Miller(2003). 9The article fully devoted to exploring this theme is Andreas Huyssen’s‘‘Of Mice andMimesis’’(2001),but the ethics of Holocaust representation are a major topic in most papers on Maus,as they are indeed in mine.Well Intended Liberal Slop557 satisfaction or educe a moral lesson,turning the death of the six million into a vehicle for pleasure or homiletics.As Claude Lanzmann,director of Shoah, has said,The Holocaust is above all unique in that it erects a ring offire around itself,a borderline that cannot be crossed because there is a certain ultimate degree of horror that cannot be transmitted.To claim it is possible to do so is to be guilty of the most serious transgression._I deeply believe there are some things that cannot and should not be represented.(quoted in Mintz2001,146)It is precisely on these grounds that Spiegelman himself attacks Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List,which he accuses of staging‘‘re-creation for the sake of the audience’s recreation’’(quoted in Mintz2001,146).Spiegelman’s attempts to register his own distance and alienation from the Holocaust and his frank acknowledgement that he cannot comprehend it are sophisticated ethical responses to the issues of Holocaust representation,showing Spiegelman to be among those who,in Geoffrey Hartman’s words(2001, 111),are‘‘opposed to the modern world’s iconomania,’’at least where the Holocaust is concerned.Spiegelman turns the problematics of representation into a different,non-transgressive means of oblique representation.As Andreas Huyssen(2001,35)argues,‘‘Maus acknowledges the inescapable inauthenticity of Holocaust representations in the‘realistic’mode,but achieves a new and unique form of authentication effect on the reader pre-cisely by way of its complex layering of historical facts,their oral retelling, and their transformation into image-text.’’To quote Hartman(1996,53) again,‘‘estranging a too-familiar though traumatic history,the‘barbaric’effort to wrest beauty or lyricism from it,or the anti-aesthetic mingling of creative and explicitly reflective styles,’’all these issues‘‘are seen in the surprising work of Art Spiegelman.’’What this discussion suggests,however,is that in his Holocaust narrative Spiegelman turns to productive account the very liabilities that in his view disqualify him from writing explicitly about race in America.And the solutions hefinds in the instance of Holocaust representation raise the question of why the same solutions–ironizing frames,provisional perspective,and an aesthetics of absence–might not have served equally well to resolve the difficulties he faced in representing the African American experience.IIBy translating the cat-and-mouse metaphor to the European context, Spiegelman circumvents the dangers of writing‘‘well intended liberal slop,’’but that very act of translation carries its own moral risk,that of concealing558Andrew Lomanthe tragic American history that originally animated the allegory.I suggest that Spiegelman in fact addresses this risk in Maus,in an encounter that has a larger importance to the narrative as a whole than critics have generally perceived.In this encounter Spiegelman represents the only African American to appear in either volume,a hitchhiker whom Spiegelman,his wife Franc¸oise,and his father Vladek pick up on the way to Vladek’s cottage in the Catskills.In keeping with Spiegelman’s allegory,the hitchhiker is rep-resented as a black dog.Franc¸oise,who is driving,stops the car to offer the man a ride,a gesture that infuriates Vladek.When the man is dropped offthree panels later,Vladek explodes in a racist rant:‘‘What happened on you,Franc¸oise?You went crazy,or what?!//I had the whole time to watch out that this shvartser doesn’t steal us the groceries from the back seat!’’(II,99).Franc¸oise responds with angry disbelief:‘‘What?!’’she says,‘‘That’s outrageous!How can you,of all people,be such a racist!You talk about blacks the way the Nazis talked about the Jews!’’(II,99). Franc¸oise and Vladek quarrel the rest of the way home,until Spiegelman intervenes,saying to Franc¸oise,‘‘Forget it,honey_he’s hopeless’’(II,100). Vladek agrees,and in thefinal words of the chapter,states:‘‘Yah!_// Better we’ll just forget it.//Ah!_You see kids_We’re home sweet home already_//_Now we can make a very happy lunch from all my new groceries./Only thank God that your shvartser didn’t take them’’(II,100) (Figure2).Spiegelman suggests the irony of Vladek’s racism in thisfinal panel by representing him in silhouette,so that while he remains a Jewish mouse,he momentarily takes on the blackness of the African American dog. This exchange is the only one in the text explicitly suggesting that the African American and the Jewish experience are related,and its ironies are compounded by the fact that the incident occurs immediately following Vladek’s account of his emergence from Dachau.In the World War II nar-rative that unfolds alongside the present-day exchange between Vladek,Art, and Franc¸oise,Vladek hasfinally boarded a train that is supposed to take him out of Germany and into Switzerland.In other words,his racist attack on the hitchhiker occurs alongside the end of the war,as he begins to emerge from the direct influence of the Nazis and into contact with Americans.The page that follows the hitchhiker incident introduces chapter4,‘‘Saved’’(a title suggesting Vladek’s inscription in American providential narratives).The incident involving the hitchhiker is thefirst of several ironizing devices–some of which I discuss below–that collectively suggest that Vladek’s sal-vation from a murderously racist milieu will not be perfect,and that in America he himself will perpetuate,mutatis mutandis,the racism to which he has been subject in Germany and Poland.Well Intended Liberal Slop559 The position of Spiegelman’s mouse-persona in the exchange between Franc¸oise and Vladek is equivocal.He functions as a complex intermediary between Franc¸oise and Vladek,a role suggested by his position in the car:he sits between them in the front seat,one arm around each of them,but with his cigarette smoke carving a space between them,an image which taken as a whole suggests both intimacy and alienation.The faces of Vladek and Franc¸oise are both visible,and both are frowning;Art’s face,however,is turned away from the viewer,obscuring his reaction.This visual situating of Art between the two recapitulates his role in this exchange(and,one might argue,that of Maus itself):although he expresses his disapproval of his father’s racism,he nevertheless appeals to Franc¸oise to abandon the argument.It is this intervention that allows Vladek to get thefinal word,which he does by reaffirming his belief that their groceries were at risk of being stolen.As much as Spiegelman submits his father to critique in these pages,he is also being frank about his own role in perpetuating his father’s racism:he resolves that it is impossible to persuade Vladek to abandon his racial prejudice,or at least to recognize affinities in the experience of African American and Jew, and thus leaves Vladek’s position unchallenged.Spiegelman represents Franc¸oise as the most admirable of the three in this exchange by making it clear that she cannot easily acquiesce in the face of her father-in-law’s racism;the comic-book icon of a spiral above her head shows that she remains frustrated at the end of the exchange.Spiegelman provides the foundation for Franc¸oise’s position in thefirst pages of the second vol-ume,which begins with a self-referential peep at Art’s notebook,in which there are sketches of Franc¸oise as various kinds of cartoon animal–as moose,as rabbit,as dog,as frog,and as mouse.In thefirst panel of the narrative proper,Franc¸oise–significantly rendered as a mouse–asks Art what he is drawing,and he tells her that he is trying to resolve the problem of how to represent her,since she is French.The exchange that follows shows the difficulties implicit in sustaining the cat–mouse allegory:Art rejects Franc¸oise’s suggestion of a rabbit as‘‘too sweet and gentle,’’reminding her of‘‘centuries of anti-Semitism’’in France(II,11),then extemporaneously narrating a fable of conversion where Franc¸oise magically transforms from frog to mouse.‘‘Hmph,’’Franc¸oise replies,‘‘I only converted to make Vladek happy’’(II,12).These representational difficulties comprise a theme that recurs throughout the book.In one instance,an interviewer asks,‘‘If your book was about ISRAELI Jews,what kind of animal would you draw?’’(II,42),and Art replies,‘‘I have no idea_porcupines?’’(II,42);in another, the children of a German mother(a cat)and a Jewish father(a mouse)are represented as striped mice(II,131).In other words,the most problematicaspect of the allegory–that it threatens to reinscribe the racial divisions that Nazi ideology sought to promulgate–is met and addressed in Franc¸oise;her first appearance in the book serves to announce the pervasive instability of the allegory.As such,of all thefigures in the narrative,she is best placed to offer a critique of racial ideology.The pages involving the hitchhiker are the most explicit engagement with the African American in Maus,but they also intersect with other moments in the text,which collectively intensify as Vladek’s reminiscence comes closer to his emigration to America(and hence hisfirst encounter with African Americans).Two of these scenes in particular bear mentioning.Thefirst of these occurs near the beginning of chapter3,when Vladek tells Franc¸oise and Art about a rebellion in Auschwitz(resuming a conversation that con-cludes chapter2).Art raises the subject at the beginning of the car trip that will conclude with the hitchhiker incident,mentioning that he read an account of a rebellion where‘‘some prisoners working in the gas chambers revolted’’(II,79).Vladek replies,‘‘Yah,for this they all got killed,’’and in thefinal panel of the page states,‘‘And the four young girls what sneaked over the ammunitions for this,they hanged them near to my workshop./They were good friends of Anja,from Sosnowiec.They hanged a long,long time.Sigh’’(II,79).Spiegelman uses the image accompanying these words to suggest just how long the women have hanged.Amongst the pines of the Catskill Mountains through which the Spiegelmans are driving can be seen the legs of Anja’s friends,all still in the concentration-camp uniforms,most still shod in the wooden camp shoes:the cats’kills have accompanied Vladek in his translation to America(Figure3a).The panel is a metonym for Maus as a whole:Vladek has never left the camps and its traumas behind,which in-stead accompany him as ghosts.The theme will be repeated in the image at the beginning of chapter4,which shows the older Vladek in front of concentration-camp internees who themselves stand in front of an American flag.But the panel has a still more complex function:it signals its relevance to the hitchhiker exchange through its similarity to a panel at the chapter’s end (Figure3b).In the latter case,Franc¸oise is berating Vladek for‘‘generaliz[ing] and say[ing]that all blacks steal,’’and Vladek is protesting that‘‘you only don’t know them’’(II,100).These panels are clearly complementary.Both panels are short but wide,spanning the width of the page.The panel on page 79is the last on the page,anchoring the panels above it;the panel on page 100is thefirst on the page.Both show the Spiegelmans’car as they drive it through the Catskills.Although we know from the narrative that the car in。