Forgetting is essential to action of any kind...
it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Rub the white ash from your eyes and dwell with me on
the cover of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of
No Towers,
his own graphic narrative detailing his lived experience
of 9/11 and its ensuing aftermath on his psyche. I make mention
not only of the cover that serves as a prelude to the remembrance
that follows in his work, but the one that came before it – a
similar “black-on-black afterimage of the towers” published
in The New Yorker six days after 9/11.
Removing the very materiality of the twin towers from his
illustration, Spiegelman pulls the plug on their physical
destruction as mediated to us through around-the-clock,
play-by-play news streams and footage snapped on that day,
the kind that
catapulted even bystanders into the cult of amateur photojournalists.
Instead of the countless images burned into our collective
retina and which still serve as visual metonyms for 9/11,
only the towers’ faceless silhouettes, the shadows
of their former selves, come forward from the darkened background,
and haunt the terra firma of our own reality as a literal
physical wound now marring the horizon of lower Manhattan.
Similar to Jacques Derrida’s conception of the “specter” who “is
the future, is always to come, presents itself only as that
which could come or come back,” the razed towers demand
to be reckoned with, no matter how much we may fight against
their apocalyptic return. It is perhaps because their return
in memoriam, as a kind of ghostly memory that can never be
fully fleshed out in narrative form, has already happened
that escape from these phantom towers is near impossible.
Rather, they insist – in their near invisibility – to
be confronted, recalling other national and cultural traumas
that have given shape to the ways in which we understand
those still happening or yet to happen. By turning to global
catastrophes that never ceased happening as their (re)remembrance
enacts them once more, they are refused death in the catacombs
of history; rather, they are relived through the forgetting
that must happen in their remembrance. 9/11 can never simply
be its own, but comprehended by and through other events
that are pulled into its inner vortex of meaning-production,
even miscomprehended as trauma always eludes linguistic representation
and becomes affect, as Dominick LaCapra phrases it, “what
one cannot represent.”
The word will always miss its mark.
Spiegelman’s work then creates a system of relationality
among traumatic historical moments that have tickled the
specter of Apocalypse out of hiding, also revealing in the
process how such end-of-the-world narratives are often engineered
by hegemonic power structures which demand that certain national
collectives react and behave in conforming, non-threatening
ways. In short, he calls attention to how the American government
itself has looked through this atemporal specter in justifying
its own preemptive acts of violence against Afghanistan and
Iraq, following 9/11.
Or: could we entertain even another possibility in reading
this “black-on-black image” of the twin towers
with which I began? Could Spiegelman have intended for these
towers, like two funeral pyres on which the flames have already
been snuffed out, to recede into the background, pulled by
some force beyond our visible recognition? Does he suggest
that 9/11, like the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima,
and other cultural traumas, are bound to inevitably be sucked
up into some historical blackhole where its memory, as it
haunts the future from the past, will create no viable space
in which such “apocalyptic” moments cease to
exist?
What Spiegelman seems to believe is that even in the physical
absence of the twin towers, the presence of its weight
in history (as well as its ties to other apparent traumatic
moments) cannot be ignored or deflected elsewhere; we exist
in the shadow of what is no longer with us, and much like
those who immediately vaporized in the heat of the atom
bomb,
leaving only behind their literal “shadows” imprinted
against some material background, the spectral presence of
these towers’ material absence may privilege the need
to linger over the apparent void above the desire to fill
that void. The specter itself is the site of the sublime,
the beautifully horrific, an excess of the Real that can
never be fully integrated in the existing symbolic order.
Spiegelman demands that we stare straight into this deceptive
abyss, and find what gives shape to an event that has already
happened and is always happening without our awareness until
that knowledge is somehow violently awakened from its slumber.
As Spiegelman writes, “[O]utrunning the toxic cloud
that had moments before been the north tower of the World
Trade Center left me reeling on that faultline where World
History and Personal History collide,” he exposes what
was there all along. It was not that the “faultline” between
World History and Personal History suddenly emerged after
the north tower of the WTC collapsed, but that the collapse
itself unveiled the ever-presence of such a Janus-faced locus.
Like Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” at
whose feet, the past collects as a “single catastrophe,” Spiegelman
is literally blast from the site of trauma and lands between
World History and Personal History, recognizing that in his
own horrific experience of 9/11, he felt the echoes of a
larger history of violence that never fully escaped us; in
fact, it exists with us today and is used to always define
the circumstances we inhabit. We can imagine Spiegelman,
in the middle, holding back the forces of both World History
and Personal History on each side, so that World History
does not ultimately conquer and swallow him up entirely,
thus erasing his life, memories, and culminating outrage
at the American system’s failure to protect the people
from its own self-interests. Against a background of faces
contorted in fear, with their eyes bulging out of their heads,
Spiegelman writes, “I still believe the world is ending,
but I concede that it seems to be ending more slowly than
I once thought […] so I figured I’d make a book.” Making
this book for him then began first as a measure of self-preservation,
an attempt to prolong his Personal History and perhaps keep
at bay, World History and the destructive apocalyptic features
it possesses always.
Traversing the alternate spaces of reality offered through
comics, Spiegelman also exposes the “faultline” where
the intersections between trauma and temporality become apparent
like freshly coagulated scars; repeatedly he claims that “time
st[ood] still” on 9/11 as his frantic search for his
son and daughter along with his wife seemed likely to be
a failure after witnessing the WTC’s “glowing
bones just before it vaporized.” In fact, while time
may have seemed to stand still for Spiegelman on 9/11, he
forcibly stops time himself through this otherworldly realm
he creates; he obtains, through his cessation of real time
and beginning of imagined time, a vantage point that allows
him to see “apocalypse” in potentially every
moment – that past, present, and future refuse to be
uniformly discrete entities of time, much like his grief
which he attempted to “sort through and put into boxes” and
failed. Yet, in his insistence that Personal History survive
and be told, perhaps survive in its very telling, Spiegelman
implicates others in his process of bearing witness not only
to the trauma of 9/11 in his own life, but the ways in which
the “Bush cabal […] reduced it all to a war recruitment
poster.”
In one frame, Spiegelman dreams at his drawing desk of
old funnies on their yellowed pages, yet he must awake
and ready
to pounce on him and exploit his personal memory of 9/11
and the losses that it signified, are President Bush with
revolver and American flag in tow and Osama Bin Laden toting
a blood-stained sword, iconic of the primitive qualities
that the U.S. government attributed to Them in declaring
war.
While In the Shadow of No Towers can be defined as a project
of personal remembrance, as Spiegelman’s own attempt
to reach into the throes of oblivion and render what filled
that “shadow” before its permanence became realized
in his memory, it also serves as a powerful reclamation of
his Personal History from the World History that the state
attempts to command, massaging exaggerated fear and paranoia
of a future terrorist attack into the minds of a vulnerable
public. So while Spiegelman has crafted a space within comics
to process the fragments of his own trauma and in its telling,
to overcome it, he also “addresses us in an attempt
to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available,” Cathy
Caruth states. As his own “angel of history” who
organizes under his helm, the supposedly dead and buried
past as it unexpectedly reemerges and is resignified by our
present circumstances, Spiegelman blasts the so-called mythology
by which the American government initially deceived its people.
Through the repeated cries of his psychic “wound” caused
by 9/11 as well as his visualized confrontation with the
institutional forces working to silence that voice, Spiegelman
exposes the moment of collision between Personal History
and World History, where he finds himself and attempts to
put his fingers on its pulse. He inhabits this interface
between the two histories, similar to how he falls within
the interface between his lived experience of 9/11’s
reality and the imagined spaces of the comic medium. Both
sides, through their implication in the other, allows this
interface, or moment of collision, to not so much result
in a violent rupture but produce a dynamic site of historical
exchange and transmission that transcends both temporal and
spatial boundaries.
It is as Caruth writes, “history, like trauma, is never
simply one’s own[; it] is precisely the way we’re
implicated in each other’s trauma.” In this sense,
the traumatic history of 9/11 is never simply its “own.” Instead,
it undeniably reaches back to those of the Holocaust, Hiroshima
and the others that through his silence, Spiegelman himself
participates in their forgetting. “Time [seemed to]
stand still” for Spiegelman, as his Personal History
before 9/11 came to an apocalyptic end, only to begin anew,
but he cannot help but employ the past in trying to impose
an order of comprehension upon an otherwise insensible present.
Though divided into two parts – one being Spiegelman’s
own story about 9/11 and his politically charged reactions
to the Bush administration’s exploitation of the “attack” and
the other being a collection of old comics such as Hogan’s
Alley and Little Nemo in Slumberland which he relishes for
its ripeness of any “end-of-the-world moment” – In
the Shadow of No Towers reads as a pastiche of multiple narratives
assuming the comic strip form. Ten disparate “plates” taking
up two pages read upright in newspaper style; each of them
is titled “In the Shadow of No Towers,” acquiring
the kind of traumatic repetition that reveals traces of the
original trauma in the person’s mind as well as its
failure to be completely integrated into the existing psychic
order.
Yet this repetition also serves to defy temporal boundaries
in allowing the past to leak in the present, and potentially
change our understanding of both, that perhaps past and
present are more alike than they are disparate. It seems
through
this repetition, no one plate prevails over another. Instead
they engage with each other on a level playing field, where
each tells a different story, toying with our idea of progression
always moving in some linear fashion towards a telos. All
the while, Spiegelman works within the comic medium expected
to move in this chronological, unidirectional manner from
one box to the next. The actions and according dialogue
should be a progression from the previous material, but
from within,
Spiegelman explodes this idea of progression predicated
on linear time. Instead, he – as a character fleshed out
in illustrated form – inhabits all ten plates, either
as his spectacled, shaggy-haired self or characterized as
a dysmorphic mouse, pulled straight out of Maus, his earlier
work that confronts the past of the Holocaust.
In the first plate, Spiegelman assumes a continuation from
the past; apocalypse has already happened but it has left
behind survivors with Personal Histories to tell. He writes
against a background of the illuminated skeleton of one
of the towers before it collapses: “In our last episode,
as you might remember, the world ended […] My wife,
my daughter and I are rushing from the bomb site. We hear
a roar, like a waterfall, and look back. The air smells of
death. Many months have passed. It’s time to move on
[...] I’d feel like such a jerk if a new disaster strikes
while I’m still chipping away at the last one.”
That Spiegelman is self-admittedly “chipping away at
the last [disaster]” underscores the intention behind
his project, that despite there being nothing physically
left from 9/11, hence the actual towers into which the hijacked
airplanes flew, the remaining “shadow” itself
must be somehow “chipped away” to reach a truth
that has been elided or masked by both human defenses in
approaching traumatic memory and by, of course, the “creature
in the White House.” Progression as a march towards
the future, a movement that proceeds left to right in the
comic strip form, is emptied of its traditional importance.
In one scene, Spiegelman depicts himself in third-person,
falling from the towers in slow motion: “He keeps falling
through the holes in his head, though he no longer knows
which holes were made by Arab terrorists way back in 2001,
and which ones were always there.” Always, seems to
be the key word here, as Spiegelman resists the notion that
9/11 is anything new in our history. I wrestle with the belief
that he would simply lump 9/11 into a collective category
of national and cultural traumas, as doing so would empty
it out of its unique meaning and thus participate in what
he accuses the Bush administration of, but Spiegelman’s “falling” is
far from physical. Instead, his falling can be read as the
potential traveling through a wormhole between two points
existing on the same vertical plane – between his present
distress over his experience of 9/11 and the knowledge of
other explosive moments in both American and global history,
usually diminishing mass human annihilation on an inconceivable
scale, to mere representation, the cause of beginning or
ending wars, and nothing more.
Spiegelman’s dialogue with the past is nearly as inexorable
as the image of the glowing tower that haunts him. In the
third plate, Spiegelman as his dysmorphic mouse persona sets
Auschwitz and New York City in equilibrium, writing: “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!” On the same page, Cold-War images of impending
yet unpredictable nuclear attacks are imported. A 1962 Mars
Attacks card from TOPPS GUM, INC. entitled “Washington
in Flames,” and a poster-image of two American children
whose faces are covered by toxic gas masks reading, “NYC
TO KIDS: DON’T BREATHE” disrupt the present narrative
that Spiegelman is attempting to tell – that of finding
his daughter, Nadja from her high school located in Lower
Manhattan. Plate Eight’s version of “In the Shadow
of No Towers” is introduced with the following sub
headline: “The blast that disintegrated those lower
Manhattan Towers also disinterred the ghosts of some Sunday
supplement,” yet the “ghosts” or if we
return to Derrida’s concept of the “specter” that
appear are far from those belonging to Sunday supplements
alone. Rather, those spectral figures belong to a shared
history of collective suffering that was either initiated
or prolonged by the “killer apes” in command
of crafting a larger, coherent World History. Spiegelman
continues, “The killer apes learned nothing from the
twin towers of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and nothing changed
on 9/11. His “president” wages his wars and wars
on wages – same old deadly business as usual.”
While Spiegelman may be offering too-simplified of a parallel
between 9/11 and other past cultural traumas, which he
in some ways dislocates and manipulates to accommodate
his own
political agenda of criticizing the Bush-Cheney administration,
he nevertheless complicates the divisions between Personal
History and World History, and between before (pre-9/11)
and after (post-9/11) that the state is so intent on establishing
to facilitate its own illusion of progress against a designated
Other. Spiegelman resumes playing the role of that Benjaminian
cherub who is caught inside a storm defined as “progress,” and “propel[led…]
into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile
of debris before him grows skyward.”
Yet he is not alone, left to float through the endless
space of history like the tumbling, lost boot of an anonymous
astronaut.
Blast into a “post-9/11 future” with his eyes
mesmerized by the catastrophic elements of “past” history
that pile at his feet, Spiegelman is caught in the arms of
the eternal specter, from whom he finally realizes he can
never seek solace as it poses the possibility of apocalypse
always. Instead, he, as Derrida proffers as the best solution,
attempts to reconcile with the specter, “learn[ing]
to live by learning…how to talk with [the ghost], how
to let [it] speak or to give [it] back speech, even if it
is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself.” That
is, Spiegelman enables the specter to be solace itself, finding
within the space of collision between Personal History and
World History, between his reality and the imagined one of
comics, a way to run his pen through the invisible materiality
of the specter and impose upon it, a visibility that functions
as a testament not only to his own traumatic experience of
9/11 but his coming-to-terms with a World History perpetually
haunted by the “shadow” of inconceivable physical
and human destruction.
From guest contributor Jennifer Cho
July 2007
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