MetaMaus

One night, we’re going down to feed the cats after one of our snooze-and-probe sessions, and he’s carrying those scraps downstairs and he says, apropos of I don’t remember what, that basically he’s a nihilist. And I ask him how this involves getting up in the middle of the night to talk to dying AIDS patients, and being so available to patients way past the point of it being good for his health, and he says something that one might take as just an off-the-cuff remark, but I found profound: “Well, I decided that behaving ethically was the most nihilistic thing I could do.” It delighted me as an idea, as a way of living one’s life.

The real story in Maus, at its most basic level, is probably something that goes further than that quote from my old notebook about degrees of survival. The subject of Maus is the retrieval of memory and ultimately, the creation of memory. The story of Maus isn't just the story of a son having problems with his father, and it's not just a story of what a father lived through. It's about a cartoonist trying to envision what his father went through. It's about choices being made, of finding what one can tell, and what one can reveal, and what one can reveal beyond one knows one is revealing.