Chute-Temporality and Seriality in Spiegelman's in the Shadow of No

8/17/2019 Chute-Temporality and Seriality in Spiegelman's in the Shadow of No

1/18

Temporality and Seriality in Spiegelman's In The Shadow of No

Towers

Chute, Hillary.

American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography,

Volume 17, Number 2, 2007, pp. 228-244 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/amp.2007.0017

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona at 01/27/11 4:09PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/amp/summary/v017/17.2chute.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/amp/summary/v017/17.2chute.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/amp/summary/v017/17.2chute.html


2/18

T EMPORALITY AND SERIALITY

IN SPIEGELMAN’S

I N THE S HADOW OF N O T OWERS

Hillary Chute

Art Spiegelman is one of the most famous— if not the most famous—living cartoonists in the world. Born in Swedenin 1948 to Polish Holocaust survivor parents, Spiegelman publishedhis own magazine, Blasé , as a fifteen year old living in Queens; by thetime he was at Harpur College (now SUNY Binghamton), he had takenover the campus comics magazine, which he re-christened Mother . A key figure in San Francisco’s 1970s underground comics (or “comix”)scene, which established comics nationwide as avant-garde and for adults—and adult intellectuals at that—Spiegelman distinguishedhimself by rigorously exploring the medium’s formal energies. “Here

was this young medium that, in a sense, was the last bastion of figu-rative drawing,” Spiegelman notes in an interview. “As a result, nobody had become preoccupied [in comics] with the issues that preoccupiedmodernist art elsewhere.”1 In seminal pieces like “Don’t Get AroundMuch Anymore” and “Ace Hole, Midget Detective” (which he memo-rably described as a confluence of Gertrude Stein and pulp fiction),Spiegelman brought modernist experimentation to comics storytelling.

And in strips like “The Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History”and the early prototype “Maus,” Spiegelman expanded on the trench-ant autobiographical mode that had recently surfaced in adult comics

with the work of Justin Green (whose 1971 “Binky Brown Meets theHoly Virgin Mary,” a narrative of sexual awakening and Catholic guilt,is widely credited as the first autobiographical comics text).

Spiegelman also re-invigorated attention to comics as an art format several crucial junctures in the past few decades, directly influencingthe sophisticated comics culture that is currently thriving. In the late1970s, as the underground was splintering and threatening to sink,Spiegelman, along with Bill Griffith, founded and edited the “comicsrevue” Arcade , which rejected the more superficial and juvenile

American Periodicals , Vol. 17 No. 2 (2007)

Copyright 2007 by The Ohio State University


3/18

aspects of underground comics culture (sex, drugs, gratuitous vio-lence) in favor of a strong focus on innovative work. In 1980, Spiegel-man, along with his wife, Françoise Mouly, founded RAW , a magazinethey initially self-published in their SoHo loft. The sophistication, dar-ing, and lavish production in RAW —which sold out all of its print runs—suggested not only that there was a large community of tal-ented cartoonists out there, but also that comics were, in fact, an art form; it created an acute awareness of the originality of the form. It

was in RAW that Spiegelman first published his masterpiece, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale , serially, over the course of a decade.

The groundbreaking Maus , which was eventually collected andpublished in two book volumes by Pantheon, shook up mainstreamexpectations of comics when it was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of Biography in 1986 (it lost out toa book on Chaucer), and further when it won a “Special” Pulitzer Prizein 1992; in the years since, it has become the world’s most famous“graphic novel” (although its seriousness of purpose helped thisnomenclature to become commonplace, I prefer the term “graphic nar-rative,” as Maus is non-fiction). Depicting Jews as mice and Nazis ascats, Maus tells the story of Art’s father Vladek Spiegelman’s experi-ence in WWII, as well the son’s struggle to solicit and record his fa-ther’s testimony. It is a work of such stunning narrative intricacy that

it is no exaggeration to point out that it has singlehandedly inspiredthe academy to recognize the complexity of comics.

Spiegelman’s next book of comics—after an interval of about ten years, during which he was a staff artist for the New Yorker —is In the Shadow of No Towers , a rich, hectic, outsized meditation on 9/11, thecentral events of which Spiegelman, who currently lives in downtownManhattan, personally witnessed. In an interview with the New York Times prior to the publication of In the Shadow of No Towers , Spiegel-man, asked about the material his work covers, admitted, “so far it has been the painful realities that I can barely grasp that force me to

the drawing table. . . . I seem to have a rather grotesque muse.”2

So while In the Shadow of No Towers is a strident, fragmented book, at first glance radically different—and perhaps less appealing— than the powerful, narrative Maus , we may recognize a commontheme: characters brushing up against, and trying to make sense of,

brutal historical realities. In the Shadow of No Towers sometimes feelsmore like an interesting theoretical object than an engaging comicsnarrative; Spiegelman has said it is “hardly like a graphic novel” but rather like “novel graphics .”3 Unlike Maus , In the Shadow of No Towers

was written to be a series of discrete episodes; additionally, unlike

Maus, it is at least in part composed through color graphics Spiegel-man created on the computer (Maus was drawn and lettered through-out with a black fountain pen). Spiegelman’s ten comics pagescontained in In the Shadow of No Towers were considered so harshly

Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers 229


4/18

polemical that the Pulitzer-Prize winner had trouble finding them an American publisher in the wake of 9/11.4 Despite the fact that venuessuch as the New Yorker , the New York Times , and the New York Re- view of Books actively solicited Spiegelman’s work in that period,Spiegelman explains that his “shrill, sky-is-falling voice, cracking at every moment” ultimately caused American editors to flee.5 Yet as withthe hugely successful Maus , No Towers is explicitly about the inter-section of past and present, both thematically and formally. And as

with Maus , In the Shadow of No Towers makes interlacing temporali-ties part of the text’s very structure.

In the Shadow of No Towers was published in book form in 2004,collecting ten broadsheet-sized comics pages. Although Spiegelmangives credit to his first publishers in the acknowledgments of the book,few American readers are or were aware of its early life as a serialstrip. Spiegelman’s pages were originally published serially (and oftensporadically) from 2001–2003 in the European and American venuesDie Zeit , The Forward , Courrier International , The London Review of Books , Internazionale , The L.A. Weekly , The Chicago Weekly , andWorld War Three Illustrated . While “In the Shadow of No Towers” wasinitially planned as a weekly series, Spiegelman found that many of the pages took up to five weeks each to complete.6 In this essay, I sug-gest that the publication of “No Towers” as a serial comic strip, ap-

pearing in print at irregular intervals, reflects the traumatictemporality Spiegelman experienced after 9/11, in which a norma-tive, ongoing sense of time stopped or shattered; he feels that thesepages represent what he calls “a slow-motion diary of the end of the

world.”7

As he discusses candidly throughout the book and elsewhere,Spiegelman became “a broken husk of a space cadet” after seeing thefirst plane crash into the tower ten blocks away from him, running to-

wards the scene to find his daughter (at that time a freshman at theadjacent Stuyvesant High School), and then getting her out as the

north tower collapsed behind them.8 Throughout No Towers , Spiegel-man refers to himself by appellations such as “basket case,” and hedescribes his desire to communicate “hysterical fear and panic”(Comic 5; “Sky” np). But while Spiegelman mocks himself, creatingdistance, No Towers argues that “paranoia” is not delusional. Equally terrified of his own government and of terrorism (he explains that he’s“waiting for some other terrorist shoe to drop”), Spiegelman’s messagein No Towers is that—as he repeats over and over—“the world is end-ing” (Comic 10). No Towers elaborates the continuousness of this feel-ing long after 9/11, in how the comics page engenders spatial

overlapping and multiple traumatic temporalities. Spiegelman writesthat 9/11 left him “reeling on the faultline where World History andPersonal History collide—the intersection my parents, Auschwitz sur-

vivors, had warned me about when they taught me to always keep my

230 American Periodicals


5/18

bags packed” (“Sky” np). Despite the intermittence of the appearanceof his “No Towers” pages, Spiegelman sought regularity in composingthem: as he states about his post-9/11 state of mind, “If I thought inpage units, I might live long enough to do another page.”9

Here, I propose to examine—to use the language of the call for pa-pers for this special issue of American Periodicals —“the difference a periodical/serial context makes to the comics.” Specifically, I wouldlike to examine the difference that a periodical/serial context makes toIn The Shadow of No Towers , a text that cemented Spiegelman’s statusas one of the world’s few public intellectual cartoonists.10 (Spiegel-man’s June 2006 cover story in Harper’s , “Drawing Blood: OutrageousCartoons and the Art of Outrage,” is a recent example that indicatesthis status; in 2004, a few months after the publication of No Towers ,he was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People inthe World.”)11

Spiegelman’s book is deeply informed by a serial context, but it works to refigure a traditional notion of seriality for a text registeringthe crisis of witnessing a traumatic world event. The inaugural strip inNo Towers offers an angled, jutting box of text, unmoored at the topright of the page, providing the following synopsis: “In our last episode,as you might remember, the world ended.” Since this strip is Spiegel-man’s first in the collection, of course, there was no last episode;

Spiegelman here demonstrates the perpetuity of trauma, and also how it places stress on a dominant notion of the serial. This essay readsthe jagged sequencing of the “No Towers” strips in their original formas part of the disruption of linear or regular serial context that Spiegel-man also enacts at two further levels: at the level of the book’s strange,overall structural movement, and also within the strips themselves. Iassert that No Towers , conditioned by a traumatic temporality, pres-ents an experimental view of sequence and seriality that powerfully— and politically—suggests the enmeshing of the past and the present.

In the book, Spiegelman’s twenty-first-century comic strips are

followed by reprints of old newspaper comic strips from around theturn of the last century, among them such titles as Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan (1900–1932), Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1911; 1924–1926), Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjam- mer Kids (1897–1918), and Gustave Verbeck’s Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo (1903–1905). No Towers is a thick-paged volume containing Spiegelman’s original ten comicstrips—which he has called “the first tower”—followed by seven plates,

which are lavish reproductions of the older comic strips—and whichhe has called “the second tower.”12 No Towers is also unpaginated (al-

though Spiegelman’s double-spread comics episodes are numberedconsecutively with Arabic numerals, and the seven subsequent platesthat reproduce the older comic strips—and which vary in size; not allare double-spreads—are marked with Roman numerals). I read its



6/18

fragmented, unorthodox approach to pagination as a material register of trauma’s inability to conform to the logic of linear and temporalprogression. With his strange, two-part structure, Spiegelman calls at-tention to the ephemerality of comic strips—his own and others’— through their figuration as the eminently destructible towers. Theephemerality of comic strips, Spiegelman suggests, is appropriate for

what he calls an “end-of-the-world moment.”13 And we may under-stand the content of the comic strips contained within the “towers”themselves as elaborating the following theme: Spiegelman’s lamenta-tion about just how ephemeral those “skyscrapers and democratic in-stitutions are” (“Sky” np).

The confusion the combination of new and old comics might pro- voke is, as Spiegelman notes in an interview, “exactly the point of the book.”14 He explains this choice in an essay in the book preceding thehistorical strips. Given my focus here, it is particularly relevant that he opens this essay, which is called “The Comic Supplement,” by ex-plaining how two different media forms—which are here non-serial forms—were unable to capture his attention in the aftermath of 9/11.Hearing poetry, he writes, his “mind kept wandering”; and as for music, he found it “too obscenely exquisite” (np). Notably, we may un-derstand that most poetry and music are produced in a non-serialcontext, created as unique and singular cultural production (which

may account for the negative connotation with which Spiegelman hereendows the word “exquisite”).

In part, it is the very seriality of the old comic strips that provides what Spiegelman calls “solace” to his 9/11-shattered mind: he notesthat the old comic strips, to a certain extent because of the context of their serial production, “were made with so much skill and verve but never intended to last past the day they appeared in the newspaper”(“Comic Supplement” np). It is their very perceived regularity —in thiscase daily or weekly—coupled with the almost existential futility, asSpiegelman suggests, of crafting aesthetically sophisticated objects not

meant to last , which gives the strips special value to this book on9/11. The word “serial” can be understood as “taking place or occur-ring in a regular succession”; likewise, the word “periodical” indicates“recurring at regular intervals” (these are the primary definitions fromthe OED ; the definition of the noun form of “periodical” provides thesame language: “a magazine or journal issued at regular or stated in-tervals”). No Towers everywhere invokes—if only to push on or refig-ure—regularity. As a structural object, its narrative compositionhighlights its own imbalance, its so-called “confusion,” by congregat-ing new and old serial comics work, calling attention to the disruption

of linear temporality and duration. No Towers structurally offers no“end” that implies healing or transcendence: time moves backwards,skipping in the movement of the strips from 2001 (“In the Shadow of No Towers”) to 1921 (George McManus’s Bringing Up Father ). Working



7/18

specifically against any historico-philosophical metanarrative of “progress,” the structure of No Towers argues through its narrativegrouping of original and historical material that the “end” is in fact a return to the old.15 The book’s controversial content, too, provides ex-amples of this political-aesthetic stance, framing events by showing ussuch circumstances as 9/11 entwined with Auschwitz, and charactersfrom the contemporary Maus entwined with old comics charactersfrom the turn of the nineteenth-century.

One statement in No Towers , from Spiegelman’s eighth comic strippage, seems to sum up the book’s position: “The killer apes learnednothing from the twin towers of Auschwitz and Hiroshima . . . Andnothing changed on 9/11. His ‘President’ wages his wars and wars on

wages—the same old deadly business as usual” (Comic 8). A further,and equally striking, example is Spiegelman’s third comic page. Thestrip presents at least six simultaneous and even literally contiguoustemporalities, which accrete and interrupt each other, figuring thepervasiveness of historical trauma that Spiegelman avows is the result of dominating power unimpeded by disastrous loss of human life. Heresmoke is a figure of the presence of the past: Art connects his father’sinability to describe the smell of the smoke of bodies in Auschwitz withhis own indescribable olfactory experience in Lower Manhattan in2001, all the while himself smoking, as he does in Maus , “Cremo”

brand cigarettes. (In Maus , Spiegelman drew the character Artie’ssmoke as the smoke of human flesh drifting upwards from Auschwitz,a move that implied Artie’s guilt at commercializing the Holocaust andalso the impossibility of escape from the traumas of the past.) “I don’t posit the scale of what was happening to me on 9/11 to what hap-pened to my parents,” Spiegelman explains in an interview. “But of course”—and here he echoes the language of the introduction to No Towers —“there I was standing at the same juncture of personal and

world history.”16

So far, my brief discussion of this highly complicated text has

suggested that No Towers , in its composition as a material/physicalobject, represents fragmented, anachronistic sequencing by incorpo-rating at its conclusion the seven plates that reproduce old, twentieth-century American newspaper comic strips. Further, I would like toexamine how the conceptual anchor of No Towers , its play upon a his-torical serial context, operates within Spiegelman’s comics pages. De-notatively, every single unit of mappable space in the book—includingthe front and back covers and endpapers—references a historical se-rial context. I will very briefly describe some fundamental facts about each segment, noting its serial intertexts, before analyzing those pages

that offer a particularly arresting re-purposing of serial form. The front cover depicts a host of cartoon characters falling

through the sky, including but not limited to the Katzenjammer Kids,Little Lady Lovekins, Happy Hooligan, the Yellow Kid, and Krazy Kat.



8/18

The back cover continues the theme in black-on-black, the characterssuspended in space in postures of tumbling. Both front and back

black-on-black endpapers are jammed up against the image of an old, yellowed Pulitzer newspaper front page from September 11, 1901. InComic 1, Spiegelman offers his own, old-fashioned-style gag-comic-strip “Etymological Vaudeville.” In Comic 2, he draws himself as hischaracter from Maus , which, as noted, was initially serialized in RAW magazine, surrounded on either side by tiny versions of old cartooncharacters. He is here holding a comics color supplement of Hearst’sNew York Journal —complete with its own, legible, mini-comic strip— and he also draws here on The Katzenjammer Kids , figuring Mama Katzenjammer as the face of a woman in downtown Manhattan on9/11, and creating his own so-called Tower Twins characters, whichare directly based on the Katzenjammer Kids themselves. In Comic 3,he represents himself again as his character from Maus , and he offersan example of a “Mars Attacks” card, a serial novelty item from the1960s. Comic 4 presents, again, his Katzenjammer doppelgänger Tower Twins ; Comic 5 is still haunted by the pair, who open the stripas their large, faded images overlay the north tower of the World TradeCenter. They close this page, too, by starring in their own comic-

within-a-comic, titled “Remember those dead and cuddly Tower Twins.” Comic 6 gives us references to Happy Hooligan , Little Nemo in

Slumberland , and Maus , blending two temporally distinct historicalserial contexts: one early twentieth-century; one late twentieth-century. The strip is signed, after Little Nemo creator Winsor McCay,simply “McSpiegelman.” Comic 7 refigures the serial comic strip Up- side Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and the Old Man Muffaroo ; it con-cludes, as in the previous page, by showing the title character of Little Nemo , a young boy in the historical strip, here as a mouse, and againthis page carries the signature “McSpiegelman.” Comic 8, from whichthe horizontal band of falling cartoon characters on the book’s cover isdrawn, features the Katzenjammer Kids , Little Lady Lovekins , Bringing

Up Father , Happy Hooligan , The Yellow Kid , Krazy Kat , and Maus .Comic 9 draws on a periodical comic book tradition in displaying a faux card deck called “The Architects of Armaggedon” supplemented

by the note “with apologies to Wally Wood & EC Comics.” Finally, thelast comic page features Happy Hooligan , Maus , and a whole host of serial comics characters, both historical and contemporary, includingLittle Orphan Annie, Charlie Brown, even characters from Doonesbury and R. Crumb’s comic books (i.e. Mr. Natural, who appears on thet-shirt of Spiegelman’s daughter-drawn-as-a-mouse, Nadja).

While every one of his original pages is deeply invested in a histor-

ical serial context, a few of Spiegelman’s pages in particular merit closer scrutiny here. It is important to note that we may see that anawareness of seriality—again, “taking place or occurring in regular succession”—occurs on every level possible in No Towers : structurally,



9/18

thematically, and formally. What one gets when one reads No Towers is an odd range of serialized comic strips: new work by Spiegelman,followed by older work by a range of deceased newspaper cartoonists.Spiegelman’s own pages are themselves stippled with characters andstyles from these serial cartoonists: they loop through everywhere,haunting and invading his pages. As I have mentioned, his work evenoffers its own, embedded, serialized comic strip within the serialcomic strip—the Tower Twins . Further, I would like to suggest that each one of Spiegelman’s comics pages itself, in its most basic formalqualities, recognizes and plays off of seriality in how its frames takeplace or occur in succession—or not. The idea of seriality in comics isconnected to the material, visual rhythm of the created page, in

which a trace of the imaginary, projected regularity of the grid is always present. My understanding of rhythm in comics is connected toconcepts anchored in both poetics and in music—such as pacing,tempo, phrasing, stress, insistence (Gertrude Stein’s term), and alter-ation.17 (While Spiegelman, as I have mentioned, writes that oldcomics, unlike music and poetry—such as W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” which acquired renewed popularity in 2001—were the only “cultural artifacts” that appealed to him in the wake of the 9/11 dis-aster, the inherent formal procedures of music and poetry, outside of a serial context of publication, have often been usefully discussed to

elucidate the features and qualities of comics pages [“Sky” np].)18

While cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud defines thecomics medium as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliber-ate sequence,” what we see in Spiegelman’s work, rather, is a kind of deliberate stress on sequence and juxtaposition as they are tradition-ally conceived.19

The comics page, and Spiegelman’s in particular, always presentsa kind of serialized architecture, either gridded conventionally—offer-ing regular intervals, regular panels, gesturing towards a consistent “rhythm of acquisition” in reading—or deviating meaningfully from the

grid.20 To examine No Towers ’s self-consciously architectural mode, we need to look at one of Spiegelman’s definitions of comics. It is cru-cial that Spiegelman attaches the very concept of narrative with thespatial, “materializing” work of comics.21 In his 1977 collectionBreakdowns (which is rare and out-of-print but is soon to be re-published by Pantheon), Spiegelman writes, “My dictionary definesCOMIC STRIP as ‘a narrative series of cartoons . . .’ A NARRATIVE is a defined as ‘a story.’ Most definitions of STORY leave me cold . . . Except for the one that says ‘A complete horizontal division of a building . . .[which is] (From [the] Medieval Latin HISTORIA . . . a row of windows

with pictures on them).’”22 The fundamental form of comics, then, islike a building, composed of rows of windows, or frames. In other

words, the form of comics is basically serial: a sequence of regularly spaced windows.



10/18

Yet, if Spiegelman thinks of comics panels, and pages, and groupsof pages, as constructed architecturally like buildings, then, what heproceeds to show in the book is also that if the twin towers are trau-matically “tumbling structures,” and he is in a paranoid “shatteredstate,” the comics page is uniquely equipped to register that fragmenta-tion.23 In Comic 2, Spiegelman begins with a sequence of panels,preceding the title, which calls attention to the architectural and non-transparent surface of the comics page (Figure 1).24 While the first panelis a conventional bordered box, the second shifts out from the tier, and

each succeeding panel reveals more and more depth in its position onthe white page, until eventually the panels become the twin towers,casting a long, opaque shadow diagonally down across the page. In thelast tier of this strip, Spiegelman echoes this graphic analogy when he

writes of New York City’s twin towers, “I never loved those arrogant boxes.” In the language of comics, “boxes” refer to panels. But here,Spiegelman also echoes the graphic message of the opening of the strip

with a verbal affirmation that towers are boxes and boxes are panels. This strip shows how the medium of comics uses the space of the

page to narrativize. Spiegelman describes his imaginative re-creation

of his father’s Auschwitz experience in Maus in the following way: “I’mliterally giving a form to my father’s words and narrative, and that form for me has to do with panel size, panel rhythms, and visualstructures of the page.”25 And now in No Towers , the formal elementsof comics, in part because of the book’s thematic focus on architec-ture, are, as he says, “allowed to become [even] more overt.”26 No Towers is formally experimental, riveted to showing the efficacy of thecomics medium for traumatic representation. (The way I am using “ex-perimental” here conforms to Marianne DeKoven’s use of that term as“the obstruction of normal reading.”)27 Confronting the discourse of

history with the discourse of art, Spiegelman interrogates the ontolog-ical status of the past.28 In No Towers , comics are presented as theonly way to organize the fragmented, discursive structure of paranoia and trauma. Working on Maus , Spiegelman referred to comics panels


Figure 1. From In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 2004 by Art

Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.


11/18

as “coffins”; here, in No Towers , they are windows, and the book, whiledetailing the crumbling of the towers, also rebuilds them in its basicgraphic procedure: there is a formal recuperation at work—a kind of re -fenestration—without the all-too-easy psychic recuperation coun-seled by mainstream redemption narratives.

By experimenting with what he calls the “stylistic surface” of thepage, Spiegelman aims throughout No Towers to get the reader lost onthe page by erecting and then violating the grid of the page to reflect 9/11’s demolition of what he has called “the world grid.”29 Often, thereader does not know where to go next: one usually reads horizontally from left to right, but at certain moments in No Towers one comes to a narrative juncture in which one may read vertically or horizontally,

without being instructed which to do first. Strips are interrupted by embedded mini-strips; panels take on unusual shapes and sizes (fig-ured, for instance, as scatter of snapshots); unhinged images float over and under frames, disrupting narrative movement; and frames

break out of their erected rows. And in half of Spiegelman’s ten strips,the north tower becomes its own page-spanning vertical frame, a kindof spectral roadblock creating narrative crisis.30 The cartoon figuresfrom the past, then, here stand as legible markers for this contradic-tory double gesture of comics: regular, serialized, re-occurring; about to be demolished, de-regulated, and de-regulating.

The serialized characters are literal marks of the past, but of thepast as not past , much like, as the book suggests, the World TradeCenter itself. Hence the title of the book. Hence also Spiegelman’sstatement, “It’s inevitable that [No Towers ] is a contemplation of comics as a metaphor for September 11.”31 We see this most powerfully

with Spiegelman’s serial within his serial, the Tower Twins . In Comic2—the first appearance of these updated, terrorized and terrorizingKatzenjammer Kids—the Tower Twins wear the twin towers on their heads, yet they are also cast within the long, black, diagonal shadow of the World Trade Center that additionally floats behind the jumbled,

multidirectional panels. And while Comic 2 has the World Trade Cen-ter’s diagonal shadow as its backdrop, Spiegelman’s fourth comic pagehas the Twins themselves as a ghostly backdrop, blown up to hugeproportions, the blank white of their startled eyes contrasting with theBenday dots of their turn-of-the-century costumes, peeking out from

behind a layer of black-bordered comics frames. The conflation of thetowers—which stand in themselves for Spiegelman’s traumatic 9/11experience—with the serialized characters becomes even more evident on the next page, Comic 5, in which a Tower Twin’s face spectrally stamps an image of the North Tower collapsing in several panels.

While in the first tier, his face floats in outline behind the tower, it gradually gains prominence, replacing the fading tower, moving from

background to foreground. As the overall structure of the book suggests, and as we see here, the past overtakes the present.



12/18

This overtaking is most powerful and most dramatic in Comic 10,his last, where we see both rigorous experimentation with the space of the page and Spiegelman’s self-figuration as two different, prominent,historical serialized comic strip characters (Figure 2). This page explic-itly considers comics as architecture; at first glance, for this reason, it might look initially like the most regular page in the book. Here,Spiegelman draws the twin towers as two large panels, each subdi-

vided by their own panels. The sets of panels-within-panels each tell a narrative that moves forward in time. Through its spatial dynamics,this page multiplies temporalities. While it offers two narratives that move forward within the space of buildings, it simultaneously displaysa separate moment suspended in time. The building-panels standagainst a blue sky; a plane swoops in through the blue of the gutter,frozen in the moment before it hits the tower. While comics are struc-turally about moving forward in time, this page makes overt the symp-toms of traumatic temporality: time as both frozen, and time as“aiming backwards instead of forwards,” as Spiegelman puts it.32 HereSpiegelman utilizes virtuosic page layout, building a narrative archi-tecture that makes manifest his definition of comics as “a completehorizontal division of a building.” Yet through its play of internal andexternal space, the architecture of the page splinters and enmeshestemporalities, showing how in a state of trauma, time is no longer able

to be simply understood and chronologized.In the first tower of panels, Spiegelman draws himself realistically

in the top tier, facing readers directly: bespectacled, balding, smoking,looking perplexed. In the second tier—and in the remaining tiers— he

visually morphs into Frederick Burr Opper’s character Happy Hooli-gan, but a red text box announces that he is a “Hapless Hooligan In-terviewed on TeeVee” as he narrates his disappointing post-9/11interview with NBC. In the second tower of panels, again, Spiegelmandraws himself realistically in the top tier, facing readers directly, as a

yellow text box announces, “On 9/11/01 time stopped.” In the second

tier, after a bomb explodes in his face, he emerges from the smoke asHapless Hooligan. Yet in the next panel, which is three times as largeas the preceding one, Spiegelman pictures himself, with his family,amidst a sea of comics characters, as his Maus persona. Spiegelmanhere inserts himself explicitly into a historical world of serializedcomics characters, among which his serialized autobiographical Maus character is a part. He inserts himself into a serial space of the past,

both claiming Maus ’s prominence in a trajectory and claiming the holdthat the past has on him through the characters of comics history, in-cluding his own self-created character, a Jewish mouse, who is mired

in the trauma of Auschwitz. This concluding strip is about the danger of losing the sting and bite of history, and, paradoxically, the suppos-edly ephemeral comics characters help him to be grounded in the



13/18





14/18

space where he can be open to ethically remembering the past. Thestrip opens with the sentence, “Genuine Awe has been reduced to themere ‘Shock and Awe’ of jingoistic strutting.” It ends with the sentence,“The Towers have come to loom far larger than life . . . but they seemto get smaller every day . . . Happy Anniversary.”

Throughout No Towers , the past and present jostle and layer eachother, “smashing” into each other to make graphically legible their co-existence. We see this right away with the title page. Spiegelman re-prints the front page from the September 11, 1901 New York World ,

which carries the fitting headline “President’s Wound Reopened; Slight Change for Worse” (Figure 3). There is also an equally fitting headlineabout the jailing of Emma Goldman for conspiracy to kill President McKinley.33 As a palimpsest over this century-old front page is a circu-lar, glossy, color panel of the tumbling north tower, glowing orange,sandwiched by bits of blue sky, and framed above and below by theglossy yellow letters of the book’s title and Spiegelman’s dark, mattelowercase signature overlaying a bottom-row report about Mrs.McKinley’s courage. Spiegelman echoes the theme of wounding in-

voked by the headline with this oft-repeated image of the collapsinggrid of the north tower, bringing to mind Cathy Caruth’s explanationof trauma as a “wound that cries out.”34 Here, the image that repeti-tively represents No Towers ’s wound violates the grid of newspaper

columns with an interruption that yet bespeaks a connection betweenpast and present. Spiegelman’s language in discussing this palimpsest is violent: on this title page, he says “the new and old get to be smashed and co-exist”; he also speaks about the “crushing” together of past and present.35 Spiegelman here, as elsewhere, unmoors thetrauma of 9/11 from 2001, just as he suggests McKinley’s sustainedrelevance to our current President in matters of empire: McKinley wasthe president who assented to the U.S.’s first imperial interventions inCuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Phillippines.

“The sky is falling,” the title of No Towers ’s introduction, is a cliché

that, experientially, on 9/11 became literal for Spiegelman, who livesproximate to the former World Trade Center. But further, No Towers asserts, the trauma of 9/11 is both a particular and an ambient trauma, inflected by and inflecting the past. It is this idea—history as“untranscendable horizon,” as Jameson puts it—that the book endeav-ors to literalize on the page through its complex register of history,temporality, and recursive serial form.36 As I have argued, the stripsthemselves replicate the disturbance of a linear narrative sequence by often obstructing the reading pattern comics usually establish, pre-senting time as moving backwards instead of forwards—a move that is

further intensified, and made intelligible, by the fact that Spiegelmandraws upon and incorporates characters and styles from turn-of-the-century serial newspaper comic strips. No Towers suggests that comics provides a political and/or ethical shape to trauma by making



15/18

its processes graphically legible—that is, readable—on the page. Tounderline, as I do here, how comics makes language, ideas, and con-cepts literal is to call attention to how comics can make the twistinglines of history readable through form.37

The motivating paradox of No Towers is that it borrows its forceand impact from historical newspaper comics serials once viewed asfishwrap, and yet reminds us, perhaps dismally, of the serial nature of history. This view of history, which he so forcefully established in





16/18

Maus , is also evident in the repetitive title Spiegelman once (unsuc-cessfully) proposed for an exhibit at the Holocaust Museum: Never

Again and Again and Again. Spiegelman’s latest project—his first book in the word and image form of comics since Maus —emerged because,as he says, “One needs the voices that come at what it means to liveand die.”38 This tells us something about the comics form, the kind of

work to which its rows of sequential windows lends itself most ur-gently. Spiegelman thus recuperates the trauma of 9/11—re-buildingthe shattered pieces through comics—while he steadfastly refuses torecuperate by offering a progressive narrative with a proper “end” that

would denote closure or healing. But while No Towers draws on serialcharacters and settings often forbiddingly to suggest the interlacing of past and present temporalities, it also attempts to model how history can become livable, and even productive. Spiegelman’s trauma takesthe form of innovative representation and expression in serializedcomics, and yet this approach is contingent upon an anti-transcen-dent recognition of ephemerality—something Spiegelman takes painsto underline in presenting the correspondence of comics and buildingsthat both are all too destructible.

NOTES

1 Art Spiegelman, “art spiegelman,” in Dangerous Drawings: Interviews with Comix

and Graphic Artists , ed. Andrea Juno (New York: Juno Books, 1995), 78–99.2 Claudia Dreifus, “A Comic-Book Response to 9/11 and Its Aftermath,” New York

Times , August 7, 2004.3 Art Spiegelman, “Interview,” New York is Book Country event, Borders Stage, New

York City, October 2, 2004.4 At a recent talk, Spiegelman noted that he couldn’t say “the sky is falling!” loudly

enough, a fact that made him “crazy” and a “fringe lunatic” in the U.S.—while in Europe,

as he sees it, his opinions were “very mainstream” (Spiegelman, “Interview”). One payoff to living in what he distinguishes as neither a red state nor a blue state but “the state of

alienation,” as Spiegelman suggests, is that he’s “Seconds Ahead of His Time”—and the

press that had rejected his comic strips as too shrill in 2001 now clamor for his work,given what has unfolded in Iraq. The two above quotations from Spiegelman are both

from In The Shadow of No Towers [New York: Pantheon, 2004]; they are, respectively,from his seventh original comics episode (Comic 7), and from the prose essay titled “The

Sky is Falling!,” the first of two unpaginated essays woven into the structure of the book.

Throughout this essay, I will refer to Spiegelman’s comics episodes by the number that

he gives them in the text.5 James Campbell, “Drawing Pains,” the Guardian , August 29, 2004.6 Spiegelman explains this in “The Sky is Falling” (np). However, it is worth noting

that Spiegelman turned around the famous black-on-black cover for the New Yorker ,

which appeared just days after 9/11, very quickly (Mouly is the covers editor of the mag-

azine). The cover of No Towers replicates the magazine cover, but with the addition of a

strip of color that stretches across the width of the towers. For more on the constructionof the New Yorker cover, see Art Spiegelman, “Cover: How It Came To Be,” The

New Yorker (Online Only), October 3, 2001. Accessed February 28, 2007.



17/18

7 Art Spiegelman, Address on In the Shadow of No Towers , Barnes & Noble, New

York City, September 23, 2004.8 Dreifus, “A Comic-Book Response.”9 Mel Gussow, “Dark Nights, Sharp Pens; Art Spiegelman Addresses Children and

His Own Fears,” the New York Times , October 15, 2003. For a comparison of the repre-

sentation of trauma in Maus and in No Towers , see Kristiaan Versluys, “Art Spiegel-

man’s In the Shadow of No Towers : 9/11 and the Representation of Trauma,” Mfs:

Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (Winter 2006): 980–1003.10 It is likely that Spiegelman is, at least in the English-speaking world, the only

public intellectual of his medium; Robert Crumb, his only rival in fame, has almost en-

tirely withdrawn from public life, largely disdaining “the intellectual” as “tedious,” as he

put it in a recent and rare public appearance at the New York Public Library on Febru-

ary 14, 2007.11 See “The Time 100: Art Spiegelman: The Cartoon Genius,” by Marjane Satrapi,

Time , April 18, 2005.12 Campbell, “Drawing Pains.” No Towers is 141/2 x 20 inches. A typical broadsheet

size is 17 x 22 inches. While No Towers is clearly smaller, its comparably large size, and

its vertical, fold-out format is meant to evoke an old-fashioned broadsheet.13 Spiegelman, “The Comic Supplement,” np. This is an unpaginated essay appear-

ing in In the Shadow of No Towers after Spiegelman’s own comics pages, which serves as

an introduction to the older comics reprints that constitute the second part of the book.14 Dreifus, “A Comic-Book Response.”15 New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, at least on this point, agrees with

the book’s value: while she believes the text could have greater “metaphorical weight,”

she praises the book for not conforming to those “creative efforts [that] have tried to im-

pose a conventional narrative upon those events, consciously or unconsciously pushing

the horror and the chaos of 9/11 into a sanitized form with a beginning, middle andend—an end that implies recovery or transcendence.” “Portraying 9/11 as a Katzenjam-mer Catastrophe,” the New York Times , August 31, 2004.

16 Dreifus, “A Comic-Book Response.”17 For more on “insistence,” see Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude

Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).18 For instance, we may understand the counterpoint of musical composition as

apposite to the narrative movement between word and image in comics, and the distilla-

tion of poetic form as apposite to the condensation required by the economical form of

comics, in which contained, spatially constricted panels often must “speak” volumes.19 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art (New York: HarperPeren-

nial, 1993), 9.20

The phrase “rhythm of acquisition” belongs to Will Eisner; see his Graphic Story- telling & Visual Narrative (Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1996), 5. A typical grid of a

comics page might be nine panels, three rows of three. Maus ’s implied grid is often 12:

four rows of three.21 “Materialize” is a verb Spiegelman used in an interview with Joshua Brown (98).

See his “Of Mice and Memory,” Oral History Review 16.1 (Spring 1988): 91–109.22 Art Spiegelman, “Introduction,” Breakdowns: From Maus to Now. An anthology of

strips by art spiegelman (New York: Nostalgia Press, 1977), np.23 Spiegelman, “Interview.”24 The second comics page of In the Shadow of No Towers was excerpted on the

cover of PMLA in October 2004. Marianne Hirsch, then the editor of PMLA , noted that

there was some resistance within the MLA to having what was seen as a “political car-

toon” on the cover of its official journal. See Marianne Hirsch, “Marianne Hirsch onMaus ,” Interview by Martha Kuhlman, Indy Magazine (Winter 2005). Accessed 28 Feb-

ruary 2007. 25 Art Spiegelman, “Art Spiegelman,” Interview by Gary Groth, the Comics Journal

180 (September 1995): 52–106.



18/18

26 Art Spiegelman, “Ephemera vs. the Apocalypse,” Indy Magazine (Autumn 2005).

Accessed 12 December 2006. 27 DeKoven, A Different Language , 5. DeKoven clarifies this definition in a formula-

tion that, while here she applies it directly to avant-garde writers, is apposite for

Spiegelman: “Though we can construe sensible meanings here and there with varying

degrees of readiness—for Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett we can even find ways, after serious

thought, to interpret the whole passage coherently—those constructions can never ac-count more than partially for the writing” (5).

28 The language of historical and artistic discursive confrontation is from Linda

Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge,

1993).29 Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus CD-ROM [New York: Voyager, 1994]; David

D’Arcy, “Profile: Art Spiegelman’s Comic Book Journalism” [NPR Weekend Edition , June

7, 2003, transcript]. “Because I grew up with parents who were always ready to see the world grid crumble,” Spiegelman explains to D’Arcy, “and when it started feeling that

that was happening here and now, it wasn’t a total surprise.” Here, it is important to

note that Spiegelman’s language of the crumbling “world grid” is particularly relevant toNo Towers , where he shows us the violation and breaking of the “world grid” in both

senses of the term—phenomenologically and literally on the page.30 Glancing through Spiegelman’s original pages, it is hard not to think of Cathy

Caruth’s statement that “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or

an event,” as Spiegelman repeatedly offers, in various permutations, the image he wit-nessed on 9/11 of the “glowing bones” of the north tower of the World Trade Center right

before it collapsed. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4–5.31

Troy Patterson, “Graphic Violence,” Entertainment Weekly (September 24, 2004):44–45.

32 Spiegelman, “Ephemera.”33 Spiegelman, as it becomes clear in the pages of the book, not only likely identi-

fies with the notion of such removal of the President, but also can sympathize with the

“fringe lunacy” that the public attached to the radical Goldman.34 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience , 4.35 Spiegelman, “Address.” The concluding endpapers make a similar argument:

over the same 1901 headline, Spiegelman layers 34 headlines from various newspapers

from the mid-1990s and beyond that work as his most overt justification of his so-called

paranoia. These include: “Taliban in Texas for Talks on Gas Pipeline,” “New Attack ‘A

Matter of Time,’” “In New York, Taking a Breath of Fear,” and a 1998 headline titled, “A

Terror Warning for N.Y. and D.C.: Terror Kingpin Osama bin Laden May be Preparing toBomb New York or Washington.”

36 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 102.37 This language is from Hillary Chute, “’The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and

Graphic Representation in Maus ,” Twentieth-Century Literature 52.2 (Summer 2006):

199–230.38 Spiegelman, “Interview.”


Chute-Temporality and Seriality in Spiegelman's in the Shadow of No

Documents

Transcript of Chute-Temporality and Seriality in Spiegelman's in the Shadow of No