Spiegelman's Magic Box: MetaMaus and the Archive of Representation

The 2011 publication of MetaMaus, which marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Maus’ publication, continued Art Spiegelman's long-standing preoccupation with creating an archive of his own fraught process of representation. While the difficulties of representing his father's experiences during the Holocaust were foregrounded in the representational strategies of his acclaimed two-volume graphic novel Maus, they continued to haunt Spiegelman even after the book's publication. In 1991, a museum exhibit, ‘The Road to Maus’, displayed the layers involved in Maus’ creation. In 1994, Spiegelman developed The Complete Maus CD-ROM, an interactive, digital archive of Maus. And in 2011, Spiegelman published MetaMaus, which combines reflection on and documentation of the process of representing Maus. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's and Giorgio Agamben's theorizations of the archive, this chapter explores the different kinds of archival work that Maus and MetaMaus do. Both Derrida and Agamben call attention to the traditional archive's exclusion of affective traces of the past. The chapter suggests that Maus and MetaMaus function as archives of the ‘after-effects’ of the Holocaust. As Maus so effectively demonstrates, the Holocaust did not end with the conclusion of World War II; its effects continue to be felt decades later by the survivors as well as by their children, who did not experience the events ‘first-hand’. Whereas traditional histories of the Holocaust narrate events that took place between 1933 and 1945, Maus depicts those events along with the difficulties of responding to and representing them. In documenting the process of representing Maus, MetaMaus invites a rethinking of what counts as history, and by extension what counts as an archive.