Maus II's Emphatic Smoke: The Trace as Graphic Affect

Abstract

abstract:How is affect illustrated in Art Spiegelman's Maus II, and what implications surface from the shared air of its multilayered narrative spacetimes? Flowing across Maus II's pages, smoke inscribes the simultaneous presence and absence of approximately six million murdered Jewish people. The trace as graphic affect draws attention to the ways affect figuratively and literally materializes in quotidian spacetimes seemingly distant from the forces of catastrophe. This article blends the Derridean trace and Deleuzian rhizomatic thinking to read Maus II's smoke, smoke-like, chimney, and chimney-like graphics. At stake is the violence of essentialism and racialized nationalism, which is continuously institutionalized through the construction of linear history as an enclosure for time and space. This reading builds on Chute's analysis of spatial syntax in Disaster Drawn to show that Maus II's narrative frames fold, sidestream, and blur their boundaries. Smoke in Maus II functions as an affective force and inscriptive power which both smudges divides and marks the ongoing consequences of violence.