In the Shadow of No Towers
by Art Spiegelman
Pantheon. 42 pp. $19.95
Like all primitive forms of art, comic books can express simple things in a bold way. There is no more effective way of telling a story, especially one punctuated by the visually arresting exploits of super-heroes. And comic books are also ideal venues for presenting dreams and myths. For what are dreams but a species of graphic communication, using symbols and metaphors to penetrate beneath the surface and reveal the hidden meaning of things?
For these reasons, one might expect that a comic book about September 11 might express truths that could not otherwise be easily expressed. And there was cause to believe that the author of such a comic book might be Art Spiegelman. The child of Auschwitz survivors, Spiegelman was the creator of Maus, A Survivor’s Tale (1986), a comic book that retold the story of the concentration camps as a terrifying adult fable in which Nazi guards were depicted as cats and Jewish prisoners as mice.
Maus won a Pulitzer Prize and gained Spiegelman a coveted slot as staff artist for the New Yorker, where he worked from 1992 to 2002. As fate would have it, his most famous effort would adorn the magazine’s first post-9/11 issue: a black cover from which the towers of the World Trade Center emerged as barely perceptible ghosts, printed in even deeper black.
Spiegelman lived and worked a few blocks to the north of the towers, and he witnessed their destruction at close hand. Having spent a frantic morning trying to track down his daughter at her neighborhood school, he returned to see what would become, for him, the emblematic image of the day: “the looming north tower’s glowing bones just before it vaporized.” That image became a leitmotif in the drawings he began making that same evening as a kind of personal therapy.
Over the next years, Spiegelman produced ten large-format narrative sheets for the German weekly, Die Zeit. They were also published in newspapers in Italy, France, and the Netherlands—countries where, he writes, “my political views hardly seemed extreme.” But when he offered the sheets to the New Yorker, he was turned down, as he was by the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. Now they have been published as a book.
In the Shadow of No Towers is a handsome object, its slender vertical format deliberately evoking the proportions of the towers, which grace the cover in a reprise of Spiegel-man’s famous black-on-black New Yorker cover. Inside, the book does not offer a straightforward narrative; instead, as Spiegelman explains, “the collage-like nature of a newspaper page encouraged my impulse to juxtapose my fragmentary thoughts in different styles.” Each sheet thus consists of a loose assembly of vignettes, in which real characters and cartoon characters respond with dark humor to the same events and stride blithely into one another’s worlds.
The cartoon characters invoke the great comics of the early 20th century: Bringing Up Father, the Katzenjammer Kids, and that fanciful masterpiece of surrealism, Little Nemo in Slumberland. In the back of the book, Spiegelman reprints handsome full-size versions of these comics, evidently as a way of filling out what would otherwise be an exceptionally skimpy volume. The examples, depicting New York skyscrapers or Fourth of July shenanigans, have been cleverly chosen to relate to 9/11, although it must be said that their remarkably high level of skill casts an unfortunate light on the limits of Spiegel-man’s own talents.
In a revealing preface, Spiegel-man relates how, in the days after 9/11, he brooded over the American government’s possible “complicity” in the attacks. If he later abandoned his conspiracy theories, it was not because of any judicious reading of the evidence but because he did not want to be associated with an idea whose proponents were largely anti-Semites:
Only when I heard paranoid Arab Americans blaming it all on the Jews did I reel myself back in, deciding it wasn’t essential to know precisely how much my “leaders” knew about the hijackings in advance—it was sufficient that they immediately instrumentalized the attack for their own agenda.
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This tortuous reasoning may account for the odd dislocation at the center of In the Shadow of No Towers. Apart from the second sheet, which shows a turbaned terrorist with a bloody scimitar confronting President Bush, who is in turn armed with a flag and a revolver, we see no Islamic terrorists in this book. To the contrary: the gloss under the image of Bush and the terrorist informs us that Spiegelman is “equally terrorized by al Qaeda and by his own government.” Throughout the remainder of the book, the only figures actively engaged in murderous acts are Uncle Sam, George W. Bush, and the Bush administration.
On television, 9/11 offered a panoply of graphic imagery: the fireball of the second plane, the black cloud over Manhattan, the pneumatic plunge of the towers. These are the raw materials of any comic-book version of that day. But in Spiegelman’s reassignment of leading roles, Osama bin Laden makes no appearance at all, while President Bush is depicted, for example, toppling the Statue of Liberty. Nor do we see the brutal hijackers; instead we see a comic rendition of Dick Cheney astride an American eagle, slitting its throat.
By far the most obscene panel addresses the agony of being burned alive, a prospect whose horror impelled somewhere between 100 and 200 victims to leap to their deaths. In Spiegelman’s version, it is the adorably mischievous Katzenjammer Kids who are burned alive, running around in circles after Uncle Sam dowses them with oil.
In the single tiny panel devoted to the attack on Washington, we are shown an image from a bubblegum card of the 1950’s that is straight out of the movie Earth Versus the Flying Saucers; in it, the Capitol is being devastated by laser beams. Here Spiegelman has not only disguised once again the actual role played by Islamic terrorists but thoroughly inverted the original significance of the image.
The science-fiction movies of the 1950’s used alien invaders as cold-war metaphors, permitting us to contemplate the unthinkable consequences of a nuclear attack on our territory. Such films were as psychologically necessary as a child’s fairy tale with its images of abandonment and loss. In the case of 9/11, however, the attack was not imagined but real. Spiegelman’s metaphor thus serves only to mask what he cannot bear to know, or refuses to admit. Although he has fastidiously declined to accuse the United States of direct complicity in the attacks, his dream-world version of 9/11 contains neither any American heroism—no firemen or police slogging upward to their deaths, no Todd Beamer and Jeremy Glickman charging the cockpit to prevent the mass murder of others—nor any American virtue, and the only malefactors on the scene are the leaders of the United States themselves, their hands soaked to the elbows in oil and blood.
The actions of the unconscious are involuntary, of course, and no one should be blamed for the dreams he dreams. But In the Shadow of No Towers cannot claim the privilege of a dream, even a comicbook dream. It lacks the anarchy of a genuine dream, the delirious triumph over daytime taboos that we find expressed, for example, in the comics of R. Crumb. In its place there is the sense of a conscious and rather labored effort to make propaganda.
If there is a taboo in Spiegelman’s mind, it resides in the idea of taking sides with his own country against its enemies. He certainly comes nowhere near violating that taboo in this sad screed, which would be malevolent were it not, artistically as well as morally, so deeply embarrassing.
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