How Shading in Maus Blurs the Line Between Past and Present

Maus, for those who don't know, is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman depicting a set of interviews with his father about his experiences during the Holocaust. It is titled "Maus" because this is the German word for "mouse." In this book, the Jewish people are depicted as mice, and the Nazis are depicted as cats, as an indicator of the oppressive power dynamics that were present during the Holocaust. The whole novel is hand drawn, and is in black and white. The shading, and the lightness and darkness of the panels is able to convey the emotion that Spiegelman is trying to represent. As I was looking online for panels to analyze, I found a blog post called "An Analysis of Pastiche in Art Spiegelman's [Maus: My Father Bleeds History]," and there were two passages in this analysis that I found particularly interesting in regards to the following panel:

Figure 1 - a panel from Maus

"When watching a film or viewing an image, the past is invoked by signs like color (i.e. black and white imagery to convey a sense of antiquity, as seen in films such as Schindler’s List), certain styles of clothing, and even certain accents (people from older cultures, for instance, rarely ever speak in American accents in contemporary films). Something I noticed, however, is that Maus at times rejects using these codes and signs, thus making it a challenge to invoke a concrete sense of pastness. This blurring manifests not only through the combination of panels representing both of the novel’s narrative strands, but also through the application of the same artistic style for past and present events.

The fact that the entire graphic novel is colored in black and white, and the the images that invoke the present and the past are stylized in the same fas[h]ion, it becomes even more challenging to distinguish between Vladek’s story and his son’s attempts to create a record of this story. Notice that Spiegelman could’ve stylized the past using different drawing techniques–as he did with the well-known comic book within the comic book–but he chose not to do so. If you take another look at [F]igure 1, notice how the event taking place in the present and the event taking place in the past are colored and stylized in the same fashion. This blurring can either indicate Spiegelman’s attempt to highlight the relevance of his father’s events in today’s culture, or it can even be approached as a rhetorical device used to help readers connect the emotions embedded in both narrative strands. Could this be approached as an attempt to escape from the conventions of pastiche that are usually used in postmodern historicism?"

Figure 2 - the hanging

Figure 3 - Vladek recalling the hanging

The lack of color in this book heightens the impact of the drawings because the shading takes on that role. Figures 2 and 3, I feel, are a good example of what I'm talking about. The focus of a panel is emboldened either by a lack of shading, or a heightened presence of it, where the subjects are either completely white or black. Background subjects, memories, thoughts, and images of the past are all shaded or crosshatched. The nazi soldiers in this story are frequently depicted as shadowy, dark figures, which represents the sinister nature of their characters. While light and darkness are not always indicators of morality (light = good, dark  = bad), Maus is one instance where the the roles of light and dark are simultaneously present and not present. I can't think of another piece of media that does this the way Spiegelman does it. Light and dark tell the story, and are a big reason why Maus is a cultural masterpiece.