It seems that when something traumatic happens, time is automatically divided into Before and After. I think this must mean that history – not just the future – is altered in some way. A person might never be able to look back, to Before, without looking through the filter of the event. For example, I seem to always find myself thinking about pre-9\/11 events by saying, "Oh, that was four months before 9\/11…that was one year and a half before 9\/11…" It seems that one’s own history could be re-written that way. Then, of course, the future is partially scripted already (with the "Where were you when…?" stories that Josh and Ada mentioned in their blogs). I think that Art Spiegelman may have been getting at this a little bit in In the Shadow of No Towers. <\/p>\n
On the subject of Before, Don DeLillo mentions in his article, "In the Ruins of the Future": " The terrorists of September 11 want to bring back the past." I got the same impression with Spiegelman, and perhaps that this why he included the century-old newspaper articles and comics (sort of like what Jarrod said about how he might want to align himself with the radical voices of the past). Perhaps this is why he says, at one point, that "Nothing changed on 9\/11". <\/p>\n
Certainly no disrespect about the 9\/11 tragedy is meant when I say this, but reading this comic reminded me of a line from White Noise, when Stompanato, the head of the New York emigres, tells Jack that being successful in New York is mostly about expressing dissatisfaction in an interesting way… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It seems that when something traumatic happens, time is automatically divided into Before and After. I think this must mean that history – not just the future – is altered in some way. A person might never be able to look back, to Before, without looking through the filter of the event. For example, I … Continue reading Before and After<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}