Michael Cavna , The Washington Post; Art Spiegelman sees the new ban of his book ‘Maus’ as a ‘red alert’
"Now, though, given the latest roiling debates over which books can be banned from schools and libraries, the author of the seminal graphic memoir “Maus”appreciates his work’s long cultural tail: “I’m grateful the book has a second life as an anti-fascist tool.”
Spiegelman is speaking shortly after learning that a Tennessee school board voted unanimously this month to ban “Maus,” which in 1992 became the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize. The two-volume comic biography chronicles his family’s Holocaust history through a frame-tale of ‘70s conversations between Spiegelman and his estranged father, all told with anthropomorphic imagery: The Jewish characters are rendered as mice, for instance, and the Nazis are cats...
In the current sociopolitical climate, he views the Tennessee vote as no anomaly. “It’s part of a continuum, and just a harbinger of things to come,” Spiegelman says, adding that “the control of people’s thoughts is essential to all of this.”
As such school votes strategically aim to limit “what people can learn, what they can understand and think about,” he says, there is “at least one part of our political spectrum that seems to be very enthusiastic about” banning books.
“This is a red alert. It’s not just: ‘How dare they deny the Holocaust?’ ” he says with a mock gasp. “They’ll deny anything.”.
Spiegelman, 73, knows well the ways and whims of educational decision-makers. He cites how often “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” has been challenged and banned ever since its 1885 publication. And in 1986 — just a few weeks after book one of “Maus” was published — William Faulkner’s 1930 Southern Gothic novel “As I Lay Dying” enjoyed a regional spike in sales when it was banned by a Kentucky school district."
