For Hillary Chute, Art Spiegelman's Maus Is Still as Relevant Today as When It Was First Published

Though Art Spiegelman's Maus is having somewhat of a renaissance since it joined a growing list of banned books earlier this year, Hillary Chute has been a Spiegelman OG for a minute.

Ahead of her appearance at Miami Book Fair, New Times sat down with Hillary Chute, Northeastern professor and author of Maus Now, a collection of what she feels are the best critical writings about Maus since its publication.

Chute recalls reading Maus for the first time as a graduate student. She would later meet Spiegelman after being invited to his studio apartment in New York City, where the pair bonded over their love of comics.

After writing MetaMaus with Spiegelman in 2011, Chute spent time compiling the best texts and analyses about Maus since its debut in 1980. The result is Maus Now, a compelling look into why Maus matters as it reenters public conversation and the culture wars of the 2020s.

The responses have been edited for length and clarity.

New Times: Could you tell me what the motivations were for Maus Now? What made you decide to write it now?

Hillary Chute: Maus is coming up on its 40th anniversary. It was serialized in different forms, but it first appeared in Raw magazine in 1980, so Maus is a text that I often teach, write about in my scholarship, and read and reread often. It's an enduring work of art for many different reasons.

I've also been thinking about it recently as a text explicitly of resistance to fascism, and I think this became even clearer to me after Trump was elected and in the post-Trump era. Maus is a book about humanizing and particularizing victims of fascism, and it's a book about testimony, and it's a book about history. And those values to me seemed enduring.

A "sticky text" is the way I like to think of it. And so when it was banned in January, it felt like that underscored my argument: This is a book that's relevant now, that we need to be reading now, and also that people are attacking now.

I also think Maus had somewhat of a renaissance when it was banned that kind of reinvigorated people to take a second look at it. Would you agree?

I would agree. And I have to say it was very dispiriting last January when I first heard about the ban. But when I went online, I was so moved by people writing about Maus on social media.

Maus is a book that I've read 20 times. I worked on a book about Maus with Art Spiegelman called MetaMaus. I think about this book constantly. But I was so moved by people saying, "I read this book in high school, and it changed my life. This is the book in which I learned about the Holocaust." That sort of outpouring of support from regular people who had read Maus and publicly declared its value was so amazing.

Spiegelman also jokes that the ban was the best publicist ever. The book sold out on Amazon. His publishers are reprinting many copies in markets all over the world. It was amazing to me, although not surprising, that the ban became a global news story. My sister, who lives in Ireland, sent me an email about it.
You've mentioned that Maus has been a part of your life for a while. Do you remember the first time you read it?

It was a little bit later than I often hear it was for people these days. I first read it when I was getting my Ph.D. in English. I read it in a graduate seminar, and that was in the year 2000. I remember because it was a Bush v. Gore election year. That was 22 years ago, and it just blew my mind.

When I read it, I started thinking: How come this text works so well? What about the comic form works so well for this kind of story? It's a book that inspired my Ph.D. dissertation. It has inspired several of my book publications since. I wound up working with Spiegelman, as I mentioned before, on MetaMaus, which we worked on together for five years — all about the historical, familial, and stylistic research that went into Maus.

I still don't feel like I've solved it or cracked the code. This is a book that gets richer every time I read it.

When was the first time you interacted with Spiegelman?

When I was a graduate student living in New York, I wrote an article about Maus for a very small online comics criticism magazine called Indy Magazine, which was started by one of my former students. He asked me to write a piece about Maus, which I had taught in that class that he took with me. And so I did, and Spiegelman read it. It had my email attached to it, and he invited me to a cocktail party at his house.

I showed up at his house, and it was such a weird moment for me. I had been doing all of this research about him and trying to find anything I could about him, and here I was, going to his home. I gave myself three rules designed not to make me appear to be a graduate student. I told myself that I couldn't corner him and talk to him about my dissertation, I couldn't get drunk, and I couldn't be the last person to leave.

Then, I wrote him a letter telling him about my dissertation about Maus. I asked, "Could I talk to you about it for one hour sometime in the future?" And he wrote me back and said yes. We had a sort of immediate rapport because we're both fascinated with comics but from different angles. He's obviously fascinated with comics as a maker and innovator of comics. And I'm so fascinated by the comic form as a critic who is trying to learn how to write about comics. We really hit it off.

Was he different than what you expected?

I think Spiegelman sometimes has a reputation for being a little bit cantankerous. I had heard sort of famous things about him. At that point, he refused to do an event if he couldn't smoke during it. I had seen him give some talks in and around New York City before I knew him. It blew my mind because one was at a Barnes & Noble at Union Square in New York. It was after the smoking ban — you couldn't even smoke in a bar — and he lit a cigarette, and no one stopped him.

The reputation is being, I don't know, maybe cranky, demanding, he was so lovely and so friendly and so charming. As soon as I walked into the studio, I felt really comfortable. He's an extremely intellectually generous person. He loves lending me books, giving me references, and is always open to disagreeing about something. He loves to debate, and he loves conversation.
Could you talk a little bit about the genesis of your current book?

There were two things that I wanted this book to do. I wanted it to mix academic writing and public writing on Maus. It has generated so many interesting critical takes, both in the world of scholarship and academia. And I also really wanted it to have a global scope. The idea was that I was looking for the best writing since it was first published in the '80s to the present, not only in sort of any kind of publication but also in any language.

You said you played the role of curator this time. What was the process for finding all of these writings?

It was really hard to find some of them. Some pieces I knew I wanted to have in there, like Ken Tucker's piece from 1985 in the New York Times, I knew that had to be in there. But for a lot of these pieces, I had to rely on friends or colleagues who live in Germany, who live in Israel, who live in France, to try to help me get a sense of the scene. Once I had a sense of what was out there, I would try to figure out what was worth translating just so I could read it and then whittle down what was worth getting professionally translated. There was a lot of digging. It was part of the fun of doing the book.

Is there anything that you learned from having studied Maus for so long?

There are so many things, but I think one thing I'll highlight is that I learned something that I hope this book conveys to people, which is that right now, Maus is a classic. It's a book that sells out on Amazon. Spiegelman is about to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Foundation. But it was really different in the 1980s. Dorit Abusch described how when she first gave a talk about Maus at a museum in Israel, people got up and walked out. Because it's such a beloved text right now, younger people might not know just how steep a battle it was to get this book accepted in the way we now take for granted.

Have you shown the book to Art at all?

I should be clear here: Art had no editorial role in this book. In fact, he was begging me to include negative essays about Maus, which was hilarious. I said, "Art, if negative essays about Maus met my standard, I would include them. But the essays that are out there that are negative, I don't believe in the efficacy of their arguments." He had nothing to do with the way I composed this book, but he has seen a copy. I was very happy that he was particularly fascinated by the French essay that was translated into English, which he hadn't read before. It focuses on the figure of his older brother Richieu who died in the war before he was born. It was incredibly gratifying to have selected an essay that even the person who wrote and drew Maus could learn from.

If there were one or two things that you'd hope a reader would take away from the book, what would that be?

I think the first one would be that the horrors of the past are not past. The horrors of the past remain, and they remain in a really dangerous way, and that's always been the argument of Maus. I think we see it being profoundly emphasized, again and again, especially thinking about all the anti-Semitism in the past week. And I think the other thing that I hope people would take away is just how sophisticated, fascinating, and interesting comics can be in the hands of someone like Art Spiegelman.

An Evening With Art Spiegelman and Hillary Chute. 7 p.m. Monday, November 14, via livestream; miamibookfair.com. Admission is free.