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Mediated Narratives

In the aftermath of 9/11, a number of social critics made the dubious claim that the age of irony was coming to an end (Rosenblatt). The attacks on the World Trade Center, the carnage, the destruction, and the grief were so overwhelmingly immediate that any attempt to distance oneself from the horror of the event would somehow cheapen the sacrifices made by those in the towers and those involved in the relief effort. In many ways, it was this brand of rhetoric that prevented Americans from publicly identifying with any political ideology beyond that manufactured by the state. Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, a series of broadsheet “comix” first appearing in the German newspaper Die Zeit in 2002 and later published as a collection in 2004, challenges the notion that irony is

dead through a brutal, satiric indictment of the Bush administration and the jingoistic rhetoric it espoused in the months after the attacks. As a means of deconstructing these political narratives, Spiegelman uses text and image to create spaces of trauma—spaces that resist the temporally-defined, highly-mediated channels generated by the spectacle—that both he and the reader may enter in order to produce counter-narratives of trauma.

Unlike many other 9/11 novels, In the Shadow of No Towers treats trauma not as an effect of experiencing the attacks on the towers, but rather as a symptom of existence in the post-9/11 political environment, an environment in which media saturation and state-endorsed discourses continually threaten to deprive the traumatic moment of its political vitality. “Equally terrorized by Al-Qaeda and by his own government,” Spiegelman sees the political machinations of the Bush administration as a new source of trauma for Americans attempting to come to terms with the initial trauma of the attacks (Spiegelman ii). In the book’s introduction he explains, “When the government began to move into full dystopian Big Brother mode and hurtle America into a colonialist adventure in Iraq…all the rage I’d suppressed after the 2000 election, all the paranoia I’d barely managed to squelch immediately after 9/11, returned with a vengeance.

New traumas began competing with still-fresh wounds” (ii). These “new traumas” interestingly arise not from the immediate, visceral experience of the attacks, but rather through the mediated, processed political space created by the spectacle.

Although Spiegelman often designates the Bush administration as the chief

perpetrator of political violence, the text’s insistence on challenging the diverse modes of narrativization at the heart of institutional politics locates a more dispersed network of media, politics, and democracy as the cause of political trauma.

One of the chief aims of No Towers, then, is to create an alternative, fluid space for the reader to occupy, one that challenges and subverts the traditional narrative modes claimed by the spectacle: television, newspaper, text, and the image. In the introduction, Spiegelman discusses his textual experiments with the broadsheet form:

The giant scale of the color newsprint pages seemed perfect for the oversized skyscrapers and outsized events…I wanted to sort out the fragments of what I’d experienced from the media images that threatened to engulf what I actually saw, and the collagelike nature of the newspaper page encouraged my impulse to juxtapose my fragmentary thoughts in different styles. (i-ii)

Here Spiegelman begins to articulate the complex relationship between the private experience of trauma and the public rituals, guided by mediated narratives, involved in processing the event. Spiegelman’s book is continually aware of the tension between mediation and politics. Describing this process, David Holloway writes, “As nodal points for rapid flows of information in a time of crisis and as communications networks linking Americans together, corporate American media, particularly TV, played a vital role in mitigating this sudden subsidence in

symbols of collective American belonging by reaffirming some of its core totems” (61). Media narratives, in short, provide a very limited space of political engagement for Americans attempting to process trauma. The book’s overt attention to television and the televisual image underscores the difficulty in communicating discourse outside of these self-affirming rituals of national identification. In one frame depicting an oversized American flag broadcast over television, Spiegelman writes, “Logos…look enormous on television; it’s a medium almost as well suited as comics for dealing in abstraction” (1). Moving past his ironic treatment of comics, we can see how nationalism and mediation are fundamentally intertwined in the post-9/11 landscape and how mediated politics open the door for dangerous abstractions. Using news media—the trusted source of information for most Americans—to introduce and promote political abstractions ultimately results in a collective disavowal of political critique; banding behind the flag, we define ourselves narrowly along lines provided by the state.²

Opening productive discursive lines outside of these mediated channels, then, emerges as the chief challenge for Spiegelman. Comparing his use of the image in Maus to that in No Towers, Katalin Orban writes: