For the last post, I find myself almost at a loss for what to write about. I found it interesting to examine In the Shadow of No Towers, which took a surprisingly long time to thoroughly peruse. The first thing I contemplated was the title. Spiegelman’s use of “no towers” indicates that the significance in his work is found in the lack of what was once there. It makes me consider briefly the use of absence in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (as opposed to the road less-traveled, which the poem describes throughout it) – why make the title emphasize the path that the speaker did not choose? The seeming contradiction of the lack of towers causing a shadow is a tremendous paradox that somehow becomes possible through Spiegelman’s text – the aftermath of the fallen towers creates a shadow over New York City and America (including possible toxic conditions for the physical surroundings, the changes found within the surrounding neighborhoods, and possible multiple agendas of the government and the media).
As Verna did, I initially found the comic medium for dealing with the events of 9/11 a bit unusual; however, as Spiegelman demonstrated with his “The Comic Supplement,” from the introduction of the comic strip medium, it has been used as a way to critique. As most of our class has already acknowledged, Spiegelman is clearly making a critique on the way America reacted to and dealt with the events of 9/11 and what took place after 9/11. My only problem was that for such a limiting medium, I feel that his big idea(s), what he is really trying to say, never quite gets across. I feel that there is so much going on and such a mixture of his favorite and quite diverse predecessors that his true message perhaps gets lost. Each “page” and in many cases multiple times within a single page, his techniques and foci seem to shift so drastically, that I found myself scrambling to “make sense” of the whole thing. I also felt that there were dozens of tiny, subtle details that lacked enough background or connection to get across their full meaning. Page 6 is one of such pages with Spiegelman (as 3rd person narrator) falling down the panel along the left side but ending in a pile of trash which hosts a Happy Hooligan-like tin hat-wearing character, while the majority of the page is taken up by the Crazy Lady scene (which is interrupted in the middle with a grotesque image of the Crazy Lady as a demon taking over a hellish version of the “shared reality” of Spiegelman and the Crazy Lady. The page also contains a single panel at the bottom right in which a child mouse has fallen out of bed and discusses a dream (or reality?) with a gas-masked parent mouse. The interesting thing for me is that even though Spiegelman’s use of so many different images confuses me, I find it an appropriate choice of medium for its flexibility in allowing for so many different images – as he says himself in the opening section “The Sky is Falling,” this medium best captures the chaos and influx of images and memories (some true memories and some planted by the media or distorted by time): “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” (no page numbers in this introductory section to reference, but this is from the second page of it).