In the Shadow of No Towers
by Art Spiegelman
Pantheon

It's impossible not to compare Art Spiegelman's latest foray into the unlikely genre of historical tragedy cartoon with his most famous and influential work, the Holocaust graphic novels "Maus I" and "Maus II." Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize for that collection, but "In the Shadow of No Towers, " a brief, frenetic series of cartoons about Sept. 11, 2001, falls short in accomplishment.

Since Spiegelman won the only Pulitzer given to a graphic novel, the medium's practitioners have suffered from anxiety of influence. Not least among these sufferers is Spiegelman. Even though a reader may try to read "No Towers" in a "Maus"-less vacuum, the artist himself won't allow it; he imports into "No Towers" the smart visual lexicon coined by "Maus." He again draws himself, at least in his moments of isolated fear and self-criticism, as a mouse.

"No Towers" is much like "Maus" in its execution. It, too, is a series of panels published piecemeal in other magazines and newspapers — an episodic novel, like those of Dickens, which feels the cramp of its initial form long after it has been published in its entirety. The first half of "No Towers" is a collection of Spiegelman's deeply personal impressions of Sept. 11, cut into a neat series of two page episodes, and his narrative is compelling for its immediacy. Not only is Spiegelman a New Yorker, he is a New Yorker whose life becomes inextricably linked with the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. While most New Yorkers are paralyzed or heading north or Jersey-ward, Spiegelman and his wife run toward the towers to rescue their daughter, a student at a nearby high school. Much of the rest of the world experienced Sept. 11 through TV; our images are shared, but his are his own. To some extent, he admits, the book is an attempt to hold on to those personal impressions before they are diluted by a wash of generic ones.

Beyond this inward peek at anotherÊperspective on Sept. 11, the novel hardly satisifes. The meanings Spiegelman draws from his own impressions aren't particularly enlightening. We know "our puny brains aren't able to grapple with the events." He illustrates this first by an inappropriate impulse to run home for his camera, and later by an announcement over the intercom of the high school (located at the foot of the Trade Centers): "In light of today's events, absolutely no students will be allowed outside for lunch." People do inappropriate things in unfamiliar situations. We know this already. We know Things Have Changed — people are jarred into acting differently but are still fundamentally the same. We know it was awful, awful — the world had been turned upside-down (a simplistic visual trope that Spiegelman trots out far too many times). We know.

This is the problem with "No Towers": Anyone old enough to read it is old enough to remember its events and to have taken all those jarring images to heart — so much so that Spiegelman's images cannot dislodge our own. Perhaps comics are not the best way to explore an event we already experienced visually. "Maus" worked in part because Spiegelman's readers were largely too young to remember the Holocaust; our Holocaust slates were relatively clean, save for a few grainy black and white images of bodies and swastikas. Published 35 years after the close of World War II, "Maus" gave us images to help us understand a history we didn't live, and was able to impart feeling to its characters and derive meaning from a meaningless situation: the will to live exists long after everything else has been stripped away. The meaning of "No Towers," if it can be called that, is starkly different: "I'm scared! The world's going to hell and nobody realizes it but me!"

Wound up in the immediacy of a situation, we forget how subjective reality can be. The suddenness of an impression, even a misperception, stays with us long after it has been proven wrong. To just give something time, to let us readjust our expectations does wonders for understanding a situation and pulling some meaning from it but this is something Spiegelman does not want us to do. He wants the impressions to stay immediate, he doesn't want them diluted or explicated by the passage of time. But the passage of time is precisely what we need to understand Sept. 11.

Acknowledgement of the wisdom imparted by time is the book's main success. In the latter half of "No Towers," Spiegelman collects a series of full-page comics from the dawn of comics some one hundred years ago. Although he jocundly glosses over it in his preface to the second part ("I tell you," he writes, "some of these comics could have been written yesterday!") the comics do more than eerily portend Sept. 11. A number of puerile ethnic stereotypes illustrate how fundamental miscomprehension of the other is to the American psyche. One cartoon articulates America's clueless (and here, innocuous) meddling abroad as a blank-eyed American blunderbuss, convinced that the Tower of Pisa will fall on him, props it up with a number of wooden planks.

Spiegelman appropriately points out the most disturbing cartoon — a clumsy fellow pretending to be an Arabian prince accidently smacks his camel with a rifle. The upset camel kicks him right into a human pyramid of body builders, who beat him to a pulp. Although the impulse is to merely say, "The inadvertent symbolism is so thick you could slice it with a boxcutter" — which Spiegelman effectively says —there is clearly much more at work here. Why is it that these early cartoons are able to draw more meaning from an event that would not happen for three generations, than "No Towers," a good book by an excellent writer who was there at the scene? It seems inconceivable, but people had the same set of weakness 100 years ago as they have now. Those weaknesses — of great men and small — mimicked in the jovial dialect of the "funnies," write the story of history that leads to our present. If a gun appears in the first act, Chekov writes of the well-crafted play, it must be fired by the third. The third act is enlightened by rereading the first — the gun not yet in its fateful context but leaning inextricably toward it.

As for Spiegelman's own work, it is doesn't live up to his reputation. The old comics he collects continue to have meaning because they were general enough to take on the hidden subtleties of any age. "No Towers" is too exact and detailed to mean anything beyond precisely what the author intended. Its paranoia, its fear and its Cassandra-like warnings were anticipated by cartoons that understand its fundamental meaning better than Spiegelman does. In one Sunday "Peanuts" strip from many years ago, a shaken Snoopy jumps off his doghouse and runs to the window of Sally's room. He barks, and Sally sleepily responds, "That's all right ... everything is fine ... thank you." Snoopy runs to Charlie Brown's window and barks again. "That's okay," Charlie Brown says, "Everything is all right ... you're a good watch dog ... go back to sleep." Dejected, Snoopy trudges away. Atop his doghouse, he stares into the night sky. "You try to warn them that the world has gone mad," he thinks, "but they won't listen."

— Lindsay Nordell (lbnordell at yahoo dot com)