Book Report: In the Shadow of No Towers

I’ll say this: when I first found out that Art Spiegelman was doing a weekly broadsheet page for Die Zeit, I tried like heck to find it on-line. It wasn’t there, which was a perfectly reasonable choice for Mr. Spiegelman to make. Anway, I figured, I’ll want to buy the book, when it comes out. Well, it’s come out. It’s called In the Shadow of No Towers, and it’s pretty damn good. But ...

See, one of the things about the trauma that he discusses within the pages itself is that the weekly deadline was nigh on impossible, and it wasn’t so much regular monthly. In fact, the first is dated February 15 2002, the second is dated May 2, the third July first, the fourth at the end of September, and so on. If I were reading Die Zeit, or the Forward, or one of the other half-dozen newspapers where the thing appeared, I would have half-forgotten the series by the time one was published again, and I imagine they would be a shock both pleasurable (Hey! It’s a new Spiegelman again!) and awful (Oh, my, oh, jeez, look at that). Anyway, the shock that I had, all at once, on opening the book, is that it is only ten pages long. Yes, that’s right, ten pages. Oh, there’s a page of introduction, a page introducing the ‘Comic Supplement’, and the Supplement itself, a half-dozen reproductions of early-twentieth-century newspaper comics that are interesting and valuable and instructive and all that. But the actual Spiegelman art, the actual body of In the Shadow of No Towers is ten pages long. So be prepared for that; it may be worth twenty bucks to you, but you should plunk down that money knowing it’s a ten-page book. Oh, and this isn’t like Maus at all; Maus is a story and this is not. Frankly, I think Maus has more emotional resonance by virtue of its narrative, but I’m a narrative fiend anyway.

It’s a beauty of a book, by the way. The pages are broadsheet size, printed in luscious color on what I think of as board-book stock. The cover has the iconic black-on-black image of the towers from the New Yorker cover; the outsize pages reward slow perusal and re-reading. It’s an art book, is what it is, and a lovely (well, a hideously lovely) thing.

There are, it will surprise no Gentle Reader to discover, lots of provocative and disturbing images and text here. Some of them are funny, too, of course; the author as Happy Hooligan getting thrown out of a studio for saying his favorite American food was shrimp pad thai is hilarious. That Happy Hooligan reference on page ten, by the way, is one of many many references to early-twentieth-century newspaper comics that form a cultural lexicon for the work; I will never look at the Katzenjammer Kids the same way after seeing his image of them as “Those Dead and Cuddly Tower Twins” on page five. In a small but incredibly layered panel at the bottom right of page eight, Ignatz-Maus holds a brick/WTC tower while Officer Pupp (NYPD) tries to enforce the new smoking ban on him.

The Maus image also comes back, and Spiegelman tries it seems to shake it and the victimhood (and popular success) it represents. “Issues of self-representation have left me slack-jawed!” he writes on the second page, under panels that are slowly turning sideways to the viewer, becoming harder to read as they present blank rectangular sides rather than the front (or face, with his own non-Maus face), until they inexorably show only the two iconic rectangles of the twin towers, like everything else. Most of the book is about himself, as Maus was, ultimately; on page 6 he writes in the third person that “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”. That page ends with a small Maus in a nightshirt, having fallen out of bed, being comforted by a mother in a gas mask; the Little Nemo image is not only instantly recognizable but (for Your Humble Blogger) powerfully evocative, as that infantile wish to be told it was all a dream is still in the back of my head today.

There are flaws, and substantial ones. First of all, Art Spiegelman has no answers, and I’d like answers. He doesn’t even have particularly new ideas, so much as new representations of the ideas. More seriously, the nature of the intermittent and ambivalent series means that it has no overall structure; the panels don’t build off each other as much as reference each other. At the end, there’s no sense for me of a conclusion; he could have done another and another, as far as I can tell. His decision to stop at ten (and at the end of the third year after the attack) seems, well, not arbitrary exactly, but made out of a sense of not wanting to do any more, rather than a sense of being finished. I sympathize with that, but it does detract from the final product.

OK, that’s way too much about his book. There’s far more I could say if I let myself continue. I think it’s a fascinating thing, if you hadn’t guessed; not only the work itself, but the work situated in the world, the sense that this must be a ‘graphic novel’ because it’s published separately, even though it’s no more a graphic novel than Guernica is, or the Bayeaux Tapestry. The idea of making this kind of thing for mass production is interesting, as is the idea that it is unusual or interesting to make complex layered art of this kind for mass production. And I could go on, you know.

                           ,
-Vardibidian.