Sam Leith Sam Leith

You can’t really ‘cancel’ anything

It isn’t censorship to remove Art Spiegelman from a school curriculum

Has Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus been cancelled?

‘When parents give Maus…to their little kids, I think it’s child abuse. I wanna protect my kids!’ Who do you imagine this quote is from? Some plaid-clad member of the moral majority at a town hall meeting in Tennessee – where the local board of education in McMinn County recently caused an outcry by removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust from the eighth-grade curriculum? Nope. It’s a quote from, well, Art Spiegelman – in a 1997 comic he drew depicting a conversation he had with Maurice Sendak.

This week he took a rather different view. Interviewed by CNN, he said that in contemplating the school board ruling he had ‘moved past total bafflement to trying to be tolerant of people who may possibly not be Nazis… maybe?’

I quote that line from his earlier comic not as a gotcha, or to try to paint Spiegelman as a hypocrite. I think he’s a stone-cold genius and interviewing him has been one of the privileges of my career.

Removing it from the shelves in one or two classrooms in Tennessee has put this important book on more shelves everywhere else

The context of the line I quoted in my first paragraph is a conversation in which, essentially, Sendak gets the better of Spiegelman on the subject of childhood innocence. ‘Art, you can’t protect your kids,’ says Sendak. ‘They know everything.’

Spiegelman is an artist not a propagandist; he’s seldom interested in showing himself, where he appears as a character, as an oracle of unquestionable truth.

My point is, if Spiegelman himself can show ambivalence, the issue isn’t as simple as its culture-war treatment would have it. In the first place, to remove a book from a curriculum isn’t quite the same as ‘banning’ or ‘censoring’ it.

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