Thomas Stubblefield
For the first hundred years of their existence, comics functioned as an art form whose abbreviated shelf life rivalled the ephemerality of modern media such as television or radio.1 Born out of the nineteenth-century “circulation wars,” their serial format was aimed at transforming the casual reader into the regular customer and as such betrayed not only an incompleteness at the level of narrative, but a material disintegration that fuelled the urgency of their consumption. However, as the form has gained credence among collectors, scholars, and artists in the last several decades, the planned obsolescence of yellowing newsprint has given way to a new sense of permanency. The emerging “graphic novel” not only jettisoned the serial format (a transformation that can be traced back to the arrival of the comic book in the early 1930s) but also enjoyed high-quality printing (and correlative high prices) alongside a more sophisticated mode of address.2 Despite the shift from “disposable pulp to acid free archival paper” that has accompanied the elevation of the art form in recent years, an enduring connection to the medium’s prehistory appears at least partially to determine the medium’s cultural position (Wolk 10). At least, this seems to be the implication of the unique status that the graphic novel assumed in the wake of 9/11.
Posed somewhere between the immediacy of news and the afterwardness of art, the graphic novel in the wake of the 9/11 appeared to offer an intermediary or safe space in which as of yet unresolved questions of representation could safely be worked out. Indeed, while Hollywood and the major television networks observed an extended taboo against representing the event, this heterochronic medium seemed all but preoccupied with the disaster.3 Less than three months after 9/11, a veritable wave of publications on the disaster hit the shelves. These included 9-11Emergency Relief; Heroes: The World’s Greatest Super Hero Creators Honor the World’s Greatest Heroes 9-11-2001; After 9/11: America’s War on Terror; as well as Dark Horse and DC Comics’ release of a two-volume set on 9/11 which featured some of the most prominent artists working in the field.4 Of these works, none is as exemplary of the impasses of representation that this unique position afforded the graphic novel as Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004).
Marianne Hirsch has described Spiegelman’s work in terms of a larger trajectory of the visual culture of 9/11 that encapsulates both the “impossibility of seeing and the impossibility of not looking” (1212). This paradox manifests in the text in terms of a confusion between first-hand experience and the mediated memories of the media, an unstable relationship between textual and visual elements, as well as a pervasive play between presence and absence that informs the graphic aspect of the work. The challenges that these elements pose to the artist/narrator are presented in a way that merges the creative process with the disaster itself. As such, the dystopia presented in In the Shadow of No Towers concerns not only the event and its aftermath, but also the author’s struggle to translate his experience of the disaster into graphic narrative form. This struggle centres on two interrelated dynamics: the encroaching images of the media that serve to confuse the boundaries of personal and collective experience, and the unavailability of the “unrepresentable” as a viable visual strategy in the twenty-first century. Margaret Atwood has claimed that both utopia and dystopia contain latent versions of their opposites (66). However, in extrapolating this discourse to the creative process, Spiegelman’s work can be seen as positing an interruption between the utopian aspirations of its opposite and thereby reaffirming Fredric Jameson’s insistence on “disjoining” the concepts from one another altogether (55). In these terms, the larger impasse that the work chronicles speaks to the unavailability of a utopia to come within the post-9/11 dystopia. This condition enacts a “crisis of the representation” that differs drastically from its postwar counterpart in that representation no longer proves inadequate but unavoidable, so much so that the image appears bound to dramatize a co-opting of individual experience and, more broadly, the outside of representation.
That trauma studies would prove to be a primary lens through which scholars have read Spiegelman’s work is hardly unexpected. Not only does each new disaster seem to breathe life into this critical idiom, the work’s specific character (its abrupt shifts in location, point of view and style, atavistic re-experience of the past, and overall ontological rootlessness) bears all the classic symptoms of the Freudian constellation. This knee-jerk reaction, though productive in its own right and even indirectly referenced by the work itself, has nonetheless served to de-emphasize the reflexive character of the text and thereby obscure a crucial discourse. Taking into consideration what can only be called the work’s obsession with its own creation, an obsession that at times takes on the dimensions of the disaster itself, suggests that these same attributes might just as easily be read as the product of a historically specific conflict of representation. From this perspective, the threat to the stability of the symbolic order that structures the work is issued not only by the unassimilability of the disaster itself, but, perhaps more pressing from the standpoint of the creative process, by the absorption, even co-opting of the experience of the event by the images of the media. As this latter process shares many of the same surface features as trauma, its relative scarcity in scholarship is understandable. As In the Shadow of No Towers suggests, both dynamics are engaged in absorbing the utter incomprehensibility of first-hand experience, and in the process undermine the first-person perspective of the witness.
On the first page of the work, Spiegelman establishes the narrator’s perspective on the events of 9/11 as the structuring agent of the work: “I live on the outskirts of Ground Zero and first saw it all live—unmediated” (1). However, with the television keeping him awake at night with conspiracy theories and camera crews swarming his Manhattan neighbourhood, it is not long before the reader senses a slippage in the authenticity of this perspective. On the following page, the author reiterates his intent to “sort out the fragments of what I’d experienced from the media that threatened to engulf what I actually saw” (2). However, this text bubble is positioned underneath a static-laced image whose 4:3 aspect ratio conjures an anachronistic televisual frame, while at the same time the untenable viewing position of the image betrays the presence of a zoom lens. As Patrick M. Bray describes it, the grid-like quality of the image’s static also bears the influence of a more contemporary regime of images. He explains:
The computerized illustration, which repeats dozens of times throughout the book, calls attention to itself as visually different from the surrounding hand drawn comics. At the same time, within the image itself, its own status as the representation of a lived memory is undermined by the exaggerated size of its pixels, which guarantee the readability of the image’s technological origin. The fleeting memory of the moment just before the collapse of the north tower, a memory threatened by the devastating force of media images, can only be represented by an image that … offers a vision of disintegration (of the tower and of memory). (15)
Reaffirming the contamination of the narrator’s “unmediated” access, two frames later we see the author sitting mesmerized in front of a television as an airplane smashes into the side of the screen. The cathartic blending of lived experience and image (two realms that the author has promised to keep separate) that this scene visualizes is echoed in the work’s recurring dynamic of materialization, whereby non-visible and/or unrepresentable phenomena are mobilized by the media’s images of the event. As the seeming immateriality and instability of memory give way to a static and legible narrative in these instances, the work, as Anne Whitehead puts it, “make[s] visible the inscription of 9/11 into state organized acts of commemoration and the rhetoric of war” (234).
Describing the scene in which Spiegelman confesses to not actually seeing but hearing the jet collide with the World Trade Center, Marianne Hirsch notes that “the word-image ‘roarrrrrrrr!!’ almost covers the statement about not seeing, occluding it to the point of near illegibility. Not seeing becomes visible and even audible, as graphic as the absent towers.” Following the logic of trauma, Hirsch regards this transformation as a reflection of the way in which “words, images, and word-images work together to enact the impossibility of seeing and the impossibility of not looking” (1213). However, so much of the work seems to suggest the exact opposite trajectory, namely, the uncanny ability of experience to succumb to the visible and manifest in graphic form. Rather than a negation of the image, this manifestation of the non-visible within the frame speaks to its hyper-visualization, a process by which even non-visible sensation achieves visual form. The dystopic position of the narrator/artist comes about as a result of the intersection of the unrepresentability of the disaster and the quest to somehow preserve this quality in the graphic novel itself with the hyper-visualization of the same event, which occurs at the hands of the media.
The intrusion of this process of becoming-image into Spiegelman’s project is driven home by the objectification of the most crucially invisible aspect of the image, the frame. At the top of page two, as the author describes the sensation of trauma (“time stands still … I see that awesome tower, glowing as it collapses”), the frames gradually turn as the eye moves from left to right, eventually forming two burning towers at the end of the sequence. As the incomprehensibility of this reactivated moment transmogrifies into an iconic image, the impossibility of the traumatic experience literally takes shape. Katalin Orbán understands this emphasis on materiality in terms of Alois Reigl’s notion of “memories of tactile surface” (76). By foregrounding the object quality of a memory, such phenomena essentially introduce a material trigger that instantiates the “near” of subjective experience so as to banish the “distant view” that is to some degree inherent to the illusionistic plane of images. However, in the context of In the Shadow of No Towers this process does not return sensory experience, but rather speaks to its reification by the image.
Historically, the frame, as a materialization of Alberti’s famous theorization of the image as a “window onto a world,” turns upon invisibility (54–55). This is especially so in the context of the graphic novel, where seriality is often interrupted by actions and words that bleed outside of the frame in order to signify intensity and/or to create non-linear chronologies. In short, the frame is both an invisible cue, whose presence precludes the outside and thereby bolsters the fictitious world inside, and a boundary to be transgressed, often to mark the subjectivity of experience. The closing of the frame that the above sequence illustrates demonstrates a larger unavailability of the event to inscription. It is telling in this respect that the end result of this transformation is often canonical images of the event whose impersonal and “objective” quality gives them the air of history, while at the same time they preclude the narrator’s own experience of the event.
This opposition between material presence as both the domain of subjective experience and the residue of the ossifying tendency of the historical record manifests most acutely in the design of the book itself. Certainly, the tangible presence of the book does prompt an individual experience and, as Orbán points out, the images themselves reinforce this quality through their play with depth and texture (75). Frames are stacked on top of one another and the text is layered on top of the entire layout. Indeed, on page four the entire layout almost mimics a table upon which photographs and handwritten notes have been spread. While these attributes might serve to re-interject the here and now of reading so as to foreground the subjectivity of the reading experience, the sheer girth of the work seems to almost parody such interventions. Despite its having only seventeen full-page plates, the volume’s exceptionally thick pages create the impression of a much larger work. Turning the page for the first time, the reader feels as if they are the butt of a joke, as the book they hold more closely resembles a clandestine “hollow book” whose pages have been cut out to hide valuables or incriminating evidence than a graphic novel.
Throughout this dialogue, the opposition between incomprehensible subjective experience and legible narrative is tilted toward the latter. As this “intrusion” appears to displace experiential knowledge of the event, the self-assuredness of the author’s initial declaration gives way to an admission of non-seeing. Eventually, he describes being “haunted now by images he didn’t witness … images of people tumbling to the streets below … especially one man (according to a neighbor) who executed a graceful Olympic dive as his last living act” (6). As Katalin Orbán points out, it is telling that Spiegelman does not “fabricate the visual record” of this event and instead relies upon a verbal description that is based only on hearsay (73). Rather than the unassimilability of trauma, this non-seeing is the remainder of the media’s translation of memory into narrative, a presentation of the event, which has destabilized the parameters of image, memory, and rememberer. Accordingly, the original distinction that the narrator makes between his events and those presented on television no longer holds, as memory now appears always already prosthetic. The dystopia that this realization presents for the artist who continually seeks to rescue lived experience from the image is further magnified by his recourse to the unrepresentable, a constellation that once served to summon an outside to representation but which proves untenable for the artist/narrator.
The extermination of the Jews of Europe is as accessible to both representation and interpretation as any other historical event.
—Saul Friedlander, “Introduction” in Probing the Limits of Representation
I do not think that the Holocaust, Final Solution, Shoah, Churban, or German genocide of the Jews is any more unrepresentable than any other event in human history.
—Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth”
The cover of In the Shadow of No Towers presents one of the earliest artistic interpretations of 9/11. Originally published on the cover of New Yorker magazine on September 24, 2001, the image features what at first glance seems to be a monochromatic black surface. Only by tilting the work ever so slightly or by placing it in bright light can the shadows of the two towers be made visible. Most immediately, this play between presence and absence visualizes the lingering afterimage of the towers that the Manhattan skyline, and indeed the collective imaginary itself, now seemed to contain. At the same time, the image signalled what would soon become a resurgence of the unrepresentable. From Hollywood’s unofficial ban on disaster films to the art world’s self-imposed silence, the “most photographed disaster in history” most often appeared in the aftermath of the event as a silent but reverent non-image. As Bray points out, Spiegelman’s cover “crystallizes the [ensuing] tension between the overwhelming presence of media images [from that day] and the absence revealed by a shadow image” (15).
Gauging the depth of this internal opposition within both the visual culture of the disaster in the wake of 9/11 and Spiegelman’s own work requires that the unrepresentable be understood as a historically specific constellation rather than a transcendental outside to representation. While in the aftermath of the Holocaust illustrating the inadequacy of representation may have appeared to preserve the unfathomability of the event, such a strategy has undergone a radical transformation in recent years. Suffice it to say that Adorno’s original prohibition on poetry and the expectation of a necessary failure of the image it engendered has largely been undermined by popular culture. From Sophie’s Choice (1982) to Schindler’s List (1993), Hollywood has not only sidestepped the taboo but in fact wed the event to the image in an intimate fashion, especially for those born after the war. Recognizing that the unassimilable quality of the event does not necessarily preclude representation in the contemporary sphere, scholars such as Hayden White, Saul Friedlander, and Andreas Huyssen have recently declared the Holocaust to no longer be unrepresentable (66).
As Derrida’s critique of the void in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum suggests, recourse to absence as an aesthetic strategy can no longer be considered in terms of a contemplation of the ineffable, but rather seems to introduce a kind of nostalgic emptiness that lacks the productivity that was ascribed to its postwar instantiation.5 Derrida illustrates this shift by comparing architectural articulation of absence in Libeskind’s museum with the refusal of closure that one finds in the Platonic chora. Whereas the latter functions as “a place that precedes history and the inscription of Forms,” Libeskind’s evocation of a historically determined visual trope presents a space that is already “circumscribed” by the history it claims to destabilize (92). As such, this space largely fails to materialize as a future-oriented potentiality, but rather comes to illustrate what Leo Bersani calls “the susceptibility of all potential being to nothingness—as if potentiality could itself fail to take place … could tilt the universe backward into the void” (169).
The contradictory status of this motif in the contemporary sphere is illustrated on page three of the In the Shadow of No Towers as the narrator describes his father’s attempts to convey the horrors of Auschwitz. In recounting this event (itself a representation), the narrator suddenly appears as a character from the author’s earlier work Maus, while his cigarette and first-person narration retain the figure’s identity as Spiegelman. The transformation is emblematic of a larger chain of associations which have come to destabilize the image: the smoke from the concentration camp merges with the toxic air of lower Manhattan, which in turn slips into the cigarette smoke that fills the frame. Overseeing this chain of casual associations is the originary trauma, which Spiegelman tells us his father could describe only as “indescribable” and which subsequently appears as shadows of the present event. Such sequences illustrate what Kristiaan Versluys describes as the text’s “transmission of trauma … far beyond the immediate circumstances” (983). At the same time, they evoke the paradox of this trope in contemporary visual culture. They embody the fragmentary perceptions of an event that exceeds representation while simultaneously establishing the event as wholly representable, one that can be conjured by a well-established back history of images, which in this case the author himself has helped to establish. However, it is not simply the author’s previous work that creates this latter dynamic, but also the pervasive references to Cold War science fiction films of the 1950s and ’60s, gas mask public service announcements, and billboards for Hollywood disaster films, all of which present the unrepresentable as anything but.
This unending flow of historical images undercuts the linearity of the narrative and in this way reproduces the dislocation that occurs with trauma’s reactivation of past events.6 The subsequent collapse of time whereby the original event returns “without having lost any of its freshness” is in fact referenced throughout the text itself (“time stands still at the moment of trauma … trauma piles on trauma”) (2, 5). To this extent, the work continues a trajectory begun in Maus, which, in recounting the father’s tale of the Holocaust, presents the past’s intrusion on the present in terms of what Andreas Huyssen describes as a “cross-cutting of past and present [which] points … to how this past holds the present captive, independently of whether this knotting of past into present is being talked about or repressed” (71). However, aside from the creative impasse it creates, this reactivation seems at some more primary level safely contained within the image. Indeed, the fact that trauma itself appears as one of the cultural references to which the author resorts to convey the anxiety of the event and its aftermath suggests a kind of assimilation into symbolic discourse. From this perspective, the suddenness and lack of explanation that accompany the appearance of these images from the past testify as much to the iconic quality of the author’s earlier work and the other visual references as the reactivation of the past.
The artist’s goal to convey the incomprehensibility of the event is in some sense sabotaged by the realization of the historical determinedness of this category. Rather than a pure outside, which safely suspends the symbolic, such a trope has been thoroughly coded and as such internalized by the image. The work thus forms the very shadow that the title references. The sense of remove built into the word “shadow” combined with the “no” forms a double negative, which reiterates the visual presence of this missing thing, a presence that is canonized and historically specific. The unrepresentable as a transcendental category therefore proves unavailable in the midst of this hyper-visualization, a fate that ensures the absorption of the narrator’s very work into the narrative that it so desperately seeks to evade. Spiegelman’s attempts to preserve the incomprehensibility of the event end only in anxiety and frustration (“despair slows me down”), which ultimately renders the artist passive. We see him asleep at his drawing table, while Bush and Osama battle it out in the foreground. Confirming the utter passiveness of the artist in the face of this political struggle, a “Missing” poster for Spiegelman’s brain hangs in the background.
In the last several decades, the Holocaust has moved from a position of unrepresentability epitomized by Adorno’s prohibition on poetry and the crisis of representation in postwar art to a recognizable visual trope. This newfound representability of the atrocity speaks to a larger transformation whereby events once deemed outside the confines of representation have proven less resistant to the image under the “visual turn.” This shift was reinforced by 9/11, the reception of which, though incomprehensible at almost every level of the experience, could certainly not be described in terms of the same melancholic acknowledgement of the failure of representation that characterized the experience of the Holocaust or Hiroshima. Rather, the event was from the beginning saturated with presence as images endlessly presented the collisions and subsequent collapse of the Towers from almost every imaginable angle. Indeed, to speak of the failure of the image in such a context is not only to disregard the hyper-mediation of the disaster, but to overlook a primary intent of the attack, which itself was directed at and made for the image.
The excessive representation and the apparent “failure” that it prompts in Spiegelman’s work testify to the near immediate transformation of the event into a “national trauma” as a means to mobilize the general public for war. The dissolution of the singular perspective that the work dramatizes not only illustrates the always already prosthetic quality of media and its relation to memory, it subtly suggests the ways in which this formative power can be used to produce collective experiences and identities so as to justify larger narratives of aggression. Summarizing this progression, Kaplan explains that “trauma produces new subjects … the political-ideological context within which trauma occurs shapes their impact … [and in the end it] is hard to separate individual and collective trauma” (1). In the mobilization toward war, which began almost immediately, the individual testimony was absorbed into such collective framings in order to forge the other as such and in the process provide the condition of possibility for war. The violence of the event is then reproduced by a larger process, by which the bloodless and often anonymous images of 9/11 become historical record. Registering an encroaching objectification of the image and a correlative unsustainability of an outside to representation, Spiegelman’s work conveys the drama of resistance and assimilation to the narrative of “9/11” which was formed within and by the image. The dystopia of the event bleeds into the process of representation itself, both of which acknowledge the limitlessness of the image at the same time they expose its vulnerability.
1 As Rebecca Zurier describes, “Most accounts trace the invention of the modern comic strip to the Sunday humor sections, which were developed as ammunition in the circulation wars waged in the 1890s by the American newspaper tycoons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Entertaining characters, reappearing each Sunday, ensured that loyal readers would buy the paper week after week, providing a steady audience for advertisers” (98).
2 While there is a great deal of uncertainty as to when the first graphic novel arrived, the first self-described graphic novels emerged in the mid-1970s. Examples include Bloodstar (1976) by Richard Corben and Red Tide (1976) by Jim Steranko.
3 As Spiegelman explains: “The only cultural artifacts that could get past my defenses to flood my eyes and brain with something other than images of burning towers were old comic strips; vital, unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the 20th century” (“Disaster Is My Muse”).
4 This preoccupation continued in the years that followed as works such as The 9/11 Report (2006) and American Widow (2008) continued this head-on look at the traumatic events of that day.
5 Citing a pervasive fear of “aesthetic pollution” that pervades postwar art and architecture, Brett Ashley Kaplan points out that even the initial connection between monumentality and Fascism was shaky at best. Not only did the conception of, for example, Speers’s monumental architecture predate the Nazi regime by at least a century, but there was considerable disagreement within the party over the proper form of Nazi art. In fact, many, including Goebbels, were sympathetic to Modernist design despite its eventual demonization in the Degenerate Art Exhibition and other venues. Nonetheless, as Kaplan points out, postwar visual culture continues to operate from the assumption that monumentality is inherently fascistic and for this reason often sabotages its own attempts at history in the process (152).
6 See E. Ann Kaplan’s discussion of the way in which 9/11 dredged up memories of the air raids in London during World War II in “9/11 and ‘Disturbing Remains’” in Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (Newark, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005).
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