MAUS: O JOGO DAS REPRESENTAÇÕES NA VERSÃO QUADRINÍSTICA DO HOLOCAUSTO DE ART SPIEGELMAN

Abstract

This work analyzes the representational system developed by the Swedish-American cartoonist Art Spiegelman in his work Maus: a história de um sobrevivente (2009), focusing on the symbolic metaphor of the representation of Jews as mice. Pictorially narrating his father’s reports, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz’s concentration and extermination camps, the author builds an anthropomorphically represented narrative in which the real figures evoked in his father's reports become half human and half animal characters, to portray the meanings their respective cultures carried in the eyes of the current society. Ironizing the Nazi conception in which Jews were considered plagues, commonly represented by the figure of rats, Spiegelman draws the holocaust through the relationships existing in the animal kingdom. Thus transfiguring Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, and Americans as dogs, Maus's anthropozoomorphic figures embody specific meanings, illustrating not only the participation of such social groups in World War II but also the relationships that such groups establish among themselves. Based on the bibliographic research method, this analysis seeks, firstly, to contextualize the reader to the complex structuring of the literary genres that compose the work. Focusing on the theoretical conceptions of Will Eisner, in his book Quadrinho e Arte Sequential (2010), and of Art Spiegelman himself, in his work MetaMaus (2011), which unravels the creative process of Maus, the comic book embraces biographical, autobiographical, ethnographic, fictional, oral, and other technical features. This work examines, therefore, the representation of the Jew in Spiegelman's comics in the light of Stuart Hall's conceptions about the concept of representation developed in his book Cultura e Representação (2016) and his considerations regarding the notions of power relations and stereotyping.