Art Spiegelman By Jeet Heer National Post (October 2, 2004) Art Spiegelman begins his new book by taking us back to an autumn of terror, when New Yorkers cowered in fear as political violence destroyed the hopes for a new century. The year, of course, was 1901. President McKinley had just been shot by an anarchist in Buffalo and was slowly bleeding to death. The yellowing front-page of the New York World from September 11, 1901 makes for jarring reading, mixing up déjà vu with archival dust. In the good old days just like the present, expert opinion tried to sooth the public. Medical authorities, including the Pope's surgeon, offered bland re-assurances that the President would survive the assassination attempt. Meanwhile, the police were flummoxed and confused. Innocent people were rounded up by the cops, then as now totally incompetent at securing the homeland. Exactly a century later, the descendants of these Keystone Kops cast a net that dragged in hundreds of harmless Muslim immigrants while barely touching Al Qaeda. In 1901 the word "anarchist" was thrown around as loosely and inaccurately as "terrorist" is nowadays. This unexpected and resonant merging of 1901 and 2001 offers us a clue as to what Spiegelman is up to in his new book. Like the best modern artists, his goal is to always make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. As a cartoonist, Spiegelman is of course most famous for his graphic novel Maus (completed in 1991), where he took his father's memories of surviving the holocaust and translated them into the idiom of a fable, with Jews as mice and Germans as cats. The animal masks Spiegelman gave his characters was a brilliant device: it gave a visual form to the pervasiveness of Nazi racism (which did see the Jews as vermin), but also allowed the audience the safety of distance. For obvious reasons, it is easier to see animals behaving in a bestial fashion than humans doing the same. By telling his father's story in this unexpected form, Spiegelman made fresh horrors that had been worn down by clichés and dead journalistic language. Maus was especially strong in its psychological portraiture, showing how the holocaust left its mark on the family dynamics of the surviving Spiegelman clan. Selling more than a million copies, Maus was immensely and deservedly popular. Like the holocaust, although on a much smaller scale, the attacks of September 11th were atrocities so momentous that they tax the descriptive powers of language. And in fact, the typical response to bin Laden's "shock and awe" tactic has been a counter-barrage of political cant and kitsch: they hate us because of our freedom, united we stand, you're either with us or with the terrorists, and all the other painfully inadequate and simplistic slogans that emerged from that date. "The kitschification of 3,000 people's deaths" is how novelist Philip Roth described it in an interview with The Guardian. "What we've been witnessing since September 11 is an orgy of national narcissism and a gratuitous sense of victimization that is repellent," Roth said. "I feel like saying: stop, dignity demands that you stop it." In The Shadow of No Towers is an attempt, largely successful, to avoid the kitschification that Roth complains about, using Spiegelman's typical strategy of attacking a familiar story from an unexpected angle. As with Maus, Spiegelman has a personal stake in the history he re-creates. He and his family live in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood. Spiegelman's 14-year old daughter Nadja attended a high school at the very foot of the towers. At the core of this book is the story of how Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly (an art editor at The New Yorker) rushed to rescue Nadja after the planes crashed into the tower. It's an affecting narrative, filled with piquant details. As they frantically search for their daughter inside the school, the principal announces over the loudspeaker that students won't be allowed to eat outside today. Two boys high-five each other as they hear that the Pentagon has been hit. Surrounding this central story is a larger account of the psychological aftermath of the terror. Like any sensible person, Spiegelman has become unhinged by the apocalyptic upshot of 9/11, as U.S. foreign policy has been taken over by the war-mongers who use Orwell's 1984 as an operating manual. Some reviewers, mostly phlegmatic liberals, have been offended by what they see as Spiegelman's radical shrillness. These reviewers are far too wishy-washy for their own good: all really reasonable people are maddened by what's happening in the world. Calmness is a gift possessed only by bovine souls and the odd psychopath. To describe his agitated mental state, Spiegelman recruits a cast of old comic strip characters, mostly from newspapers published in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Twin Towers are transformed into the Katzenjammer Kids, mischievous boys always in trouble; Spiegelman and his wife become the bickering Maggie and Jiggs from "Bringing Up Father"; Krazy Kat and friends re-enact the political dilemmas of contemporary New York. (For those not familiar with these characters, Spiegelman reprints eight pages of old comics in the back of the book - eerily enough, these old comic strips are filled with falling towers, patriotic fervor, obnoxious Frenchmen, comical Arabs, and other motifs that would fit in well in the contemporary press). The conceit behind bringing back these characters, Spiegelman explains, is that "the blast that disintegrated those Lower Manhattan towers also disinterred the ghosts of some Sunday supplement stars born on nearby Park Row. They came back to haunt one denizen of the neighborhood, addled by all that's happened since." Possessed by the spirit of old comic strips, Spiegelman imitates their very form. Each page of his book is broad-sheet size, like the Sunday funnies, although printed on a cardboard that is much more permanent than newsprint. As with the comic strips in their glory days, Spiegelman makes full use of his lavish space, which gives him plenty of room to draw architectural splendor under assault. The very shape of the new book is towering. Framing his September 11th tale as an old comic strip gives Spiegelman a new version of the Maus effect, taking a well-known event and cloaking it in a new guise. One of the strengths of the book is that it recaptures the attack on the World Trade Center as a New York tragedy, rather than a patriotic symbol for a superpower. The comic strips that Spiegelman uses were born in the in the boisterous and teeming streets of early 20th century Manhattan, so it is appropriate that they return to mourn the death of the two towers. This new book is more radical, both politically and aesthetically, than Maus. For that reason, it might not have the same popular appeal as his earlier achievement. Those who admire the Bush/Cheney regime will be discomforted by this book, since Spiegelman constantly berates these men. I personally share Spiegelman's contempt for the Texas/Wyoming junta, but I know my conservative friends won't enjoy this book as I do. The jagged style of the new narrative doesn't have the warmth of reading Maus, which made you feel like you were looking over Spiegelman's shoulders as he filled up his diary. And the shortness of the book is a problem. A slow artist, Spiegelman gives us the ten pages that took two years to produce, as against the novel-length Maus, a work of nearly a decade and a half. You can race through In the Shadow of No Towers in under an hour, although it does re-read very well and there are many little details to return to. Despite these shortcomings, the book does do something remarkable. It makes us experience what it was like to be a New Yorker on September 11th, almost lose a daughter, and live in a city that has a giant morgue at its heart. For that reason alone, this is a book to cherish.