Speaking the Unspeakable and Seeing the Unseeable: The Role of Fantastika in Visualizing the Holocaust, or, More Than Just Maus

• Main Author: Glyn Morgan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Lancaster University 2015-07-01
• Series: The Luminary
• Subjects: graphic novels; comics; WW2; holocaust; superheroes; fantastika
• Online Access: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/luminary/issue6/issue6article3.htm

This article argues for the represtationabilty of the Holocaust, or rather, it advocates the intention to represent. True representation is impossible and yet, despite the protestations of opponents such as Nobel prize winner Elie Wiesel, it is necessary. Due to the traumatic nature of the Holocaust, and the inability of those who have not experienced it to truly comprehend the terrors it entails, mimetic modes of representation are insufficient. As such, non-mimetic or fantastic modes have a vital role to play and this has been recognised from the earliest opportunity, as this article shall show. Non-mimetic Holocaust fiction begins in the camps themselves with Hurst Rosenthal's Mickey in Gurs (1941) depicting Mickey mouse as a prisoner of Gurs camp, later in 1944 Calvo et al. used barnyard fable imagery to depict France's role in the war and the brutal occupation. Both of these pieces act as precursor to the genre defining non-mimetic Holocaust piece: Art Spiegelman's Maus (1986;1991). All three of these texts use animal imagery and metafictionality to elaborate on the mimetic historical record in some manner. The article will draw to a conclusion by examining a fourth text, or more specifically a single character within a set of texts, Magneto from Marvel comics' The X-Men. Magneto stands as an example of fantastical fiction, in this case the superhero comic, appropriating the Holocaust to deepen and extend its own narrative, as opposed to Rosenthal, Calvo, and Spiegelman use of the fantastic to augment their Holocaust narrative. In doing so, Magneto's character offers us a different view point of the intersection between the visual fantastic and one of the most terrifying horrors on the 20th century.