Nilanjana S Roy: The Return of the King

SPEAKING VOLUMES

The image of the two towers crumbling in New York was shown so often after September 11, 2001, that the tragedy is almost impossible to depict in fiction.

Shock wears off, eventually; the first magazine covers that showed the towers being hit were already stale to eyes jaded by nonstop television loops of the attack, and now, three years after 9/11, other metaphors have to be found for the absence in the Manhattan skyline.

The first writers to fix a disaster in the public imagination are usually either journalists or schlockmeisters. And 9/11 saw its fair share of pulp fiction; the impact of the planes that crashed into the two towers had its tinny reverberations in short stories and novels that strayed into disaster fiction territory.

In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore found a way out by using a blank, black screen and a soundtrack; the images were so familiar that he could leave it to his viewers to insert what was missing from their mental library of pictures.

The difference between good journalism and great fiction is often just a matter of allowing time to elapse. It seemed apparent after 9/11 that any artist who wanted to capture the impact and terrible horror of that day would have to wait for sufficient time to elapse, and would have to skim over the central, over-familiar image of the towers collapsing into rubble.

It needed Art Spiegelman to break the rules, with In the Shadow of No Towers, a graphic novel produced on heavy card stock, its cover with two black silhouettes gleaming ominously at the reader.

In the landscape of the graphic novel, Spiegelman towers above his peers. (He doesn't use the term "graphic novel" himself""in his eyes, it's a marketing ploy to make "comix" respectable.)

The Pulitzer-winning Maus, which grew out of his father's memories of surviving Auschwitz, used animal masks for its characters: the Jews were mice, the Nazis cats, the Poles pigs. Spiegelman was brutally honest in Maus.

He called his father a "murderer" after his mother committed suicide. He records asking his father, Vladek, for his mother's diaries. Vladek had burned them, and cannot remember the contents: "Only I know what she said, 'I wish my son, when he grows up, he will be interested in this.'"Maus made it clear that those who survived the Holocaust continued, in ways large and small, to suffer from its legacy.

Like many New Yorkers, Spiegelman has agonisingly sharp and personal memories of 9/11. He and his wife ran through the streets to try and find their daughter, Nadya, whose school was a few blocks away from the towers. Unlike most artists, he refuses to look away, to find a polite metaphor for what he has seen since.

In an interview with Corriere della Serra last year, he said: "From the time that the Twin Towers fell, it seems as if I've been living in internal exile, or like a political dissident confined to an island. I no longer feel in harmony with American culture, especially now that the entire media has become conservative and tremendously timid."

In The Shadow of No Towers includes work that The New Yorker refused to carry post-9/11. Spiegelman was so angered by the censorship that he resigned.

"When the planes hit those two towers," jokes the Spiegelman in the comic book panels, "I got knocked into some alternate reality where George W. Bush was President."

Part of this book is a diatribe against the new US, which has turned people of his political beliefs into exiles in their own country. In 2004, his hero is "equally terrorized by Al-Qaeda and his own government", and "cowboy boots drop on Ground Zero" as the Republicans get set to transform "Tragedy ... into Travesty".

As with Maus, I don't think Spiegelman is done yet. The writer of comic books shares the same freedom as the artist over the more conventional novelist: he can create several versions of the same book, and what we're seeing is the elegant skeleton of a first draft.

Through it all, Spiegelman attempts with grim determination to capture the truth of what happened on 9/11. He was not fond of "those arrogant boxes"; the attack, if it hadn't been such a tragedy, could have been seen as "radical architectural criticism".

But the image that haunts him, that he spent months trying to convey on the page, is the one TV didn't show: the X-ray bones of the two towers, glowing just before they went down, like the last glimpse of a corpse before it's consumed in a crematorium furnace. It's these glimmering bones that surface eerily, hauntingly, throughout In the Shadow of No Towers.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com