(Click here for AV Club Interview)

“I saw stunned pigeons sitting listlessly on the pavement in lower Manhattan for days after the explosions on 9/11.  It’s almost two years later, and most New Yorkers seem to have picked up the rhythms of daily life . . . but right under the surface, we’re all still just a bunch of stunned pigeons” – Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers.

The major difference between Art Spiegelman’s 2004 book In the Shadow of No Towers, a series of ten massive comic book pages on the attacks of September 11th and their aftermath, and his Pulitzer-Prize winning Maus, a chronicle (in comic book form) of his parents’ history as Holocaust survivors, is that for the former, Art Spiegelman was there: no longer merely a notetaker of tragedies beyond representation that took place before he was born, he delivers to us a scathing critique of the hyper-visibility of the September 11th attacks by way of media imagery, the proliferation of war rhetoric (“Let’s Have Rage!” a Time magazine editorial ran) and hasty political prescriptions (for the U.S. and for the rest of the world) in place of dialogue and debate (not to mention the feckless response of the American Left), and the state of panic generalized among Americans and intensified among New Yorkers like Spiegelman himself, all with the eye (and nose) of one who has seen the World Trade Center towers collapse before the media images “burned their way into every brain, or as one who, as he puts it more succintly, “saw it all live—unmediated” (Spiegelman 1).  In reference to Maus, Michael Rothberg (my teacher!) writes, “[T]he power and originality of Spiegelman’s effort derive quite specifically from this shock of obscenity that demands that we confront ‘The Holocaust’ as visual representation, as one more commodity in the American culture industry” (Rothberg 203).  Whereas the Holocaust and the experience of Holocaust survivors tended to resist visualization and, by extension, commodification, Spiegelman’s chronicle of September 11th and post-September 11th politics takes place in a world where the brutality of the attacks was conveyed almost solely through the mode of visualization.  Fittingly, then, each page of In the Shadow of No Towers is a collage of visual impressions of the artist’s personal recollections (the crazy homeless woman screaming at him in Russian about how the Jews are responsible for the attacks, him and his wife Anja’s mad dash to check on their daughter at the United Nations School near where the towers collapsed) and the “hijack[ing]” of “those tragic events” by “brigands suffering from war fever,” all amidst the glowing infrastructure of the soon-to-be-destroyed World Trade Center towers, the last “unmediated” image Spiegelman has of the towers (4). These pages represent, in a phrase, the extreme in the midst of the everyday, or, as Spiegelman puts it, “that faultline where World History and Personal History collide.”  In an attempt to overcome trauma by finding a pure, non-politicized realm from a more innocent age, Spiegelman turns to (where else?) the newspaper comics of the early 20th century, whose very form called for disposability.  However, as I hope to show, even disposable newspaper comics cannot ultimately resist politicization.  

In the first page of the book, Spiegelman draws at the bottom a crowd of people terrified at the prospect of a shoe dropping on them, specifically, a shoe manufactured by “Jihad brand footware” (1).  Towards the top of the page, another comic strip introduces the “21st century’s dominant metaphor”: waiting for the other shoe to drop, as in waiting for something bad to happen.  After September 11th, Americans are placed in a state of panic concerning the next terrorist attack, a state of panic which threatens to become naturalized as the default mode of living, which will be justified by the end of the comic  when the other shoe does in fact drop.  However, the other shoe is not “Jihad brand footware,” but the cowboy boots which rain upon the city in 2004 as “New York is transformed into a stage set for the Republican Presidential Convention, and Tragedy is transformed into Travesty” (10).  While it would no doubt be problematic to try to name the particular stance of Spiegelman, I think it’s safe to say that his anxiety is a product of both the attacks themselves and the fear-mongering and Biblical revenge fantasies of the Bush administration.  The second page depicts a self-portrait of the artist (as a mouse, the same way he portrays himself throughout Maus) asleep at his desk while being threatened from one side by Osama bin Laden and his scimitar and from the other by a smirking, pistol-waving George W. Bush with the caption “EQUALLY TERRORIZED BY AL-QAEDA AND BY HIS OWN GOVERNMENT” (2).  

We can read the artist’s paranoia towards his government and the world in general (“I insist the sky is falling, they roll their eyes and tell me it’s only my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”) as the natural mode of perceiving major political events, or what Peter Knight calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”  As his book Conspiracy Culture explains: “A postmodern form of paranoid skepticism has become routine in a world in which the conspiratorial netherworld has become hypervisible, its secrets just one more commodity. . . .   [I]t has become . . . more an expression of inexhaustible suspicion and uncertainty than a dogmatic form of scaremongering” (Knight 75).  Spiegelman follows this conspiratorial logic when he (in mouse form) rants about how “the government has been lying about the air quality [around the collapsed WTC towers]” and about the “displacement” logic of the government and of its major institutions (the media in particular) whereby “Iraq [is demolished] instead of Al-Qaeda” and the New York Times all but confirms the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and “displaces its guilt” by apologizing “for some minor journalist’s pattern of inconsequential lies” (in reference to Jayson Blair) (Spiegelman 3, 9). 

In the case of the air quality, it is important to note that Spiegelman detects this “lie” through his sense of smell: “I remember my father trying to describe what the smoke in Auschwitz smelled like. . . .  The closest he got was telling me it was ‘indescribable.’ . . .  That’s exactly what the air in lower Manhattan smelled like after Sept. 11!” (3).  While the “Cremo” brand cigarettes¹ Spiegelman is smoking and the direct reference to Auschwitz give us a connection between Auschwitz and September 11th as events for which representation fails to do justice and for which representations in their “all-too-real materiality” are given to us by “the culture industry” as the only real window into the reality of these events, it is important to note that Spiegelman, by using his sense of smell, operates outside the realm of the visible and outside of the representations provided to us by the culture industry (Rothberg 205).  Smell is inevitably opposed to vision as a sense which purports to detect the reality behind visual representation by “smelling [it] out.”  As Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “—I was the first to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.—My genius is in my nostrils.”  According to Akira Mizuta Lippit, he “refus[es] the privileged sense of human beings—sight—for that most frequently associated with the animal: smell” (Lippit 82).  What better way to detect post-September 11th conspiracies than by “smelling out” the lies behind the official reality fed to the American public by the newspapers and news networks?  What better way to reinforce the inadequacy of representation towards an event like September 11th than by pointing out that the “indescribable” “odor of death” (in the words of W.H. Auden) surrounding the destroyed towers (and Auschwitz too) brings us closer to the real of this event than visual representation ever could?  And who better to perform this task than an animal (Spiegelman’s mouse) who has not been bombarded (or terrorized?) with images and can thus smell out the reality behind a media-manipulated reality predicated on the power of image? 

But it would be wrong to simply say that Spiegelman has smelled for himself the ashes of the collapsed World Trade Center towers and is thus able to provide us with a “real” account of the attacks and a deconstruction of the logic behind the American government’s response to the events.  The reason why smell retains a privileged position in preserving the trauma of an event is precisely because it cannot be reproduced (and commodified) the same way an image can.  Smells are “indescribable,” they “do not provide material and thus repeatable signifiers, and therefore cannot form a semiotic system” (Lippit 123).  Smell, like the event itself, is unrepresentable.  In the Shadow of No Towers itself is a series of images which share the similar handicap of media images in that they can never do justice to their object.  The “Weapons of Mass Displacement” sequence, which I have briefly touched on earlier, is an exercise in the manipulation of the image.  The panel starts with Spiegelman (as a human) sitting in a chair with a cat in his lap and a lamp on his side.  As he details how various things are displaced in the media and by the government (the drive to destroy Al-Qaeda becomes the drive to destroy Saddam Hussein, the NY Times apologizes for the white lies of a reporter instead of the lie about WMDs, Haliburton is rewarded with contracts for Iraqi oil while Martha Stewart is imprisoned on fraud charges, etc.), the images themselves become displaced as Spiegelman’s head switches places with the lamp, the cat switches places with Spiegelman, Spiegelman’s shoe switches places with his head.  Any attempt to represent the (il)logic of displacement through images is subject to the same laws that rule the image: any image can be displaced, wrenched from its context, and made to serve whatever truth or untruth those in power want to communicate. 

Now, returning to the image of Spiegelman asleep at his desk with bin Laden on one side and Bush on the other, I have left out the most important figures of this image (and the smallest): the innocent but confused comic characters populating the artist’s desk, caught (along with the artist) in the crossfire of the “war on terror.”  These comic characters – Hapless Hooligan, the Kin-der Kids, Little Nemo, Little Lady Muffkins and Old Man Muffaroo – will reappear throughout the comic as casualties of September 11th, figures forced to inhabit a new context outside the comfortable realm of newspaper print.  The cover hints at this motif of lost innocence: in front of the black on black drawing of the World Trade Center towers, we see an Osama bin Laden goat kicking into the air one of the World Trade Center towers (embodied in one half of a set of twins with the towers for hats) along with classic comic book characters, now disoriented and removed from their situatedness within a purely aesthetic realm (as much as newspaper comics can fall under the “Aesthetic” with a capital “A” banner).   In an interview with The Onion’s “AV Club,” Spiegelman discusses his recourse to comics of the early 20th century:

I felt the world was ending, relatively literally, and I found these works  presumed a long, glowing march through enlightenment into the future.   That was even though there wasn’t one for the comics, because they were really made for the day they were made, and nothing else.

As much as the comics for him have been removed from contemporary events, he cannot stop them from becoming politicized, from having their innocence stripped away.  One example of a classic comic reappearing in a resignified form in the pages of his book is the brief panel from Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland, in which Little Nemo would dream up grand adventures of himself travelling the world and, in the last panel, be woken up by his mother, who would tell him it was all a dream.  At the end of the story about the crazy homeless woman screaming at the artist about how the “kikes did it,” we see a panel where a Little Nemo in mouse form has fallen out of bed and tells his mother, “Then John Ashcroft pulled off his burka and shoved me out the window and,” to which she, wearing a gas mask, replies, “Hush, you fell out of bed, Sweetie” (6).  Fantasy and reality for Little Nemo are now forced to bear the weight of September 11th, as his dream is a bizarre conflation of anti-terrorist law, Afghan culture, and the tragic deaths of those who jumped out of the windows of the collapsing World Trade Center towers, and his reality is one in which the very air he breathes is potentially harmful.  Besides this type of insertion of contemporary trauma into classic comics, there is the postscript of the book, in which many of these classic comics are simply presented as they were printed in the newspapers.  This collection of comics, which concern the drive to war against England, malignant genies, patriotic speeches disrupted by disobedient youths, collapsing buildings, and Arab masquerades, could have simply been remnants of a bygone age in a pre-September 11th context, (or "ephemeral" in Spiegelman's words), they now become a network charged with the weight of contemporary politics.  September 11th has retroactively politicized what was once an apolitical realm. 

But how does this work?  How can one event, regardless of how powerful it is, change all that has come before it?  Slavoj Zizek, in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, a fascinating roller-coaster ride through post-September 11th politics and philosophy from Descartes to Lacan and Giorgio Agamben and a critique of both American politics and the impotent Leftist response in Europe and elsewhere, refers to something he calls the impossible act, which is “simultaneously probable and impossible,” an act which rearranges the symbolic coordinates of what has come before, making the impossible possible, or even the logical result of preceding events.  He continues,

The encounter of the real as impossible is thus always missed: it is experienced either as impossible but not real (the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe which, however probable we know it is, we do not believe will really happen, and thus dismiss it as impossible) or as real but no longer impossible (once the catastrophe happens, it is ‘renormalized,’ perceived as part of the normal run of things, as always-already having been possible).  The gap which makes these paradoxes possible is the one between knowledge and belief: we know that the catastrophe is possible, even probable, yet we do not believe that it will really happen” (Zizek 62). 

Zizek goes on to connect this with the recent debates on legalizing torture in America in dealing with terror suspects (partly accomplished through the redefinition of the term “torture” to exclude everything except organ failure and death).  For Zizek, the idea that a liberal democracy would even consider the legalization of torture is an impossible act in itself, the potential collapse of democracy into fascism, but one which is eventually accepted by the American public as a legitimate tool in the “war on terror.”  Zizek quotes Henri Bergson: “[O]ne can . . . insert [into the past] the possible, or, rather, at every moment, the past inserts itself there.  Insofar as unpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past: this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible” (62).  Doesn’t this work the same way with September 11^th, that once we investigate the historical background surrounding the attacks we see that not only has the impossible event forever been possible, but it has been probable: bin Laden had been #1 on the FBI’s most wanted list for five years, the Bush administration had received the report “Osama Bin Laden determined to strike within the U.S.,” and, in more of a symbolic vein, didn’t we see the destruction of buildings by low-flying aircraft in the movie The Matrix?  Of course, the last reference is not meant to be taken as a legitimate warning about future terrorist attacks, but that’s the point: September 11th rearranges what has come before so that the most facetious or benign images can become part of a symbolic network which points towards not only possibility but the probability of the impossible act.

Getting back to the postscript of In the Shadow of No Towers, we can interpret this series of classic comics as one of these symbolic networks detailing the possibility and probability of September 11th: images as harmless as a giant-sized Little Nemo running away from a man named Flip who is knocking over buildings trying to catch up to him or the Hapless Hooligan dressing up as an Arab for a circus show, running into a “tower” of acrobats, and getting beaten by them or kids attempting to disrupt a July 4th address with sticks of dynamite, are now part of a symbolic network pointing to the occurrence of the impossible act.  These comics are stripped of their innocence because of the way in which, to quote Bergson again, “the past inserts itself” into “the possible,” into the symbolic coordinates of our reality, reconfiguring the past in order to make the logical occurrence of the impossible act possible.  What was once a refuge the artist could turn to for relief from contemporary trauma, paranoia, and helplessness now cannot help but point directly back to the source of this trauma, paranoia, and helplessness over and over again. 

When Jacques Derrida accepted the Theodor Adorno Award on September 22, 2001, he said in reference to the attacks, “My unconditional compassion, addressed to the victims of September 11, does not prevent me from saying this out loud: with regard to this crime, I do not believe anyone is politically guiltless” (Zizek 66).  While Derrida’s statement seems directed to those who would wish to paint the contemporary situation as one of a battle between Good and Evil as well as to the American and European Leftists standing for what Zizek calls an “abstract pacifism” in the face of terrorist threats, perhaps we can apply the statement to Spiegelman’s beloved comic characters, who are violently separated from their comfortable place within “ancient” newspaper prints and injected into contemporary politics, now forced to bear part of that lost innocence we all share as a result of September 11th.  In the Shadow of No Towers then is not simply a critique of contemporary politics, but a forceful reminder of how September 11th recurs endlessly and endlessly injects new interpretive frameworks into even the very realms – poetry, religion, comics – we flee towards in order to escape our memory of the impossible become real.

(1.)  The “Cremo” brand cigarettes, as Michael Rothberg points out, pun on the name Vladek Spiegelman, Art’s father, uses to describe the crematorium at Auschwitz: the “cremo building.” 

Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture, London, Routledge: 2000
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 2000
Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 2000 (what are the odds of that?)
Slavoj Zizek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London, Verso: 2003