"[... T]he cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive." --Maus, front jacket flap.
Much was made about this quote in class on Monday, and although I agree with the general thrust of the statement, I disagree with the craft critique on how it creates this effect of defamiliarization. (quick note: according to google/firefox, defamiliarization isn't a word. but if demilitarization can be an acceptable term, then I feel comfortable with my neologism here).
My qualm is with the second part of that statement. What is the significance of the "diminutive" in Art Spiegelman's Maus? I'm not sure how much the effect of the diminutive really plays into my response to the novel. I think the surreality of talking animals enacting a holocaust narrative does more to scatter familiarity than the size of the characters. In fact, there's really no evidence that the characters in the novel are meant to be diminutive; they seem to live in normal-sized homes and use objects on a decidedly human scale. We don't see them frolicking amidst oversized lawn detritus a la Rick Moranis in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids".
Perhaps the diminution is meant to refer to the size of events? But the size of events doesn't seem to me any smaller in Maus than in any other holocaust narrative. The approach of the novel, which addresses a major historic event by focusing on the life of a single individual during that event, is a pretty standard way to gain both intimacy and epic scope in both prose and film, such as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried or David Lean's Doctor Zhivago.
I think the universality of narrative that Hayden White discusses in “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" trumps the problems of the diminutive in Maus. Although we may be accustomed to mice as these tiny little pests scurrying about our feet in dank and fetid places, we don't respond to those sorts of connotations or impulses much at all in the graphic novel, and if we do, they are tertiary to both the immediacy and familiarity of the war-survivor narrative (comforting fiction though it may be, Mr. White) and the other considerations raised by using animals as characters (such as the predatory dichotomy briefly discussed in class).
