Zizek and Spiegelman

I am interested in comics—their aesthetic qualities, their tempo, their avowed mediation. Spiegelman is a figure who’s interested me since Maus I and II, and I’ve gone back to look at some of the Raw stuff he’s produced along with François Mouly, his wife. Many great figures got their start in Raw—like Paul Chadwick of Concrete fame—and like Robert Crumb from an earlier historical period, Spiegelman has shifted from comics writer to editor of comics and writer and artist, each discreet from the other. Unlike Crumb, though, Spiegelman stayed stateside (Crumb has been in France for years), so he had an opportunity to comment directly on the events of September 11, to build from the ground up his response. In a series of oversize pages (outsize, he calls them in his intro) depicting his existential angst at his predictable emotions, his reactionary liberalism, and his total emotional evacuation, Spiegelman inhabits a number of classic comics personas, his own mouse headed, chain-smoking figures from Maus, as well as a realist depiction of himself, in an effort to multiply the possible perspectives on what is admittedly a singular work by a sole author. The black-on-black cover (printed in The New Yorker a few days after the event itself) of In the Shadow of No Towers is interrupted by an overlay of a color banner in which an assortment of classic comics characters tumble to the ground, all kicked by the same turban wearing, bearded billy-goat (though, don’t all billy-goats have beards; aren’t all mice sort of cute; can’t cats ever look cute as post-kitties?), and the juxtaposition brings in an element of pastiche and parody that serves to off-set the plunging pathos of the ebon cover. Throughout we are beset with Spiegelman’s ennui regarding the event that took place just a few blocks from his home, but at a moment—later, much later, as the pages came out months apart, and this one is in—in the strip where he’s taken on the Happy [-less] Hooligan persona (the last page, in fact), Spiegelman confronts, and is confronted by in return, the news media: in the guise of a Tom Brokaw interview, he’s taken into a studio and asked goofy questions about my favorite American whatever is—blank; to which he responds with completely removed and polemical tracts like the following. “The greatest thing about America is…uh, that as long as you’re an Arab you’re allowed to think that America’s not always so great!”
Another fav of mine is Slavoj Zizek, whose Welcome to the Desert of the Real presents us with a Marxist-psychoanalytic reading of the event of September 11: that our dreamy fantasy of one-sided liberal democracy that has become our reality has been interrupted by a competing fantasy of obscene adherence to the law of symbolic identification and violence to which the only seeming answer is yet more violence. The real of September 11—the eruption of something inassimilable into our quotidian life—is itself the fantasy of victimhood and one-sided oppression that allows us to simply forget what it is in our own policy and our own global attitude, and capital movements, that could have engendered such animosity. Careful to avoid liberal democratic rightist and leftist arguments of, on the one hand, fear of democratic advance or modernism, and on the other, the empty notion that we deserved it. Opposed to these two poles, Zizek posits a third term: we move to another narrative. On defining courage as having the courage to question one’s own position (or narrative, in the psychoanalytic sense), he says the following: “Instead of imposing our notion of universality (universal human rights, etc.), universality—the shared space of understanding between different cultures—should be conceived of as an infinite task of translation, a constant reworking of one’s own particular position” (66). And while he takes on almost every major figure in literary theory today—especially indicting cultural studies, and on the political side, positively skewering Habermaas (who deserves it)—Zizek nails it with regard to the event of September 11. And isn’t this exactly what Spiegelman was trying to do in his interview? Now, despite the fact that this interview with the producer for Tom Brokaw’s show on NBC is a part of In the Shadow of Both Towers, overall, this book is more about demonstrating the poles than positing the third term. But still, at the end, we get that the point of the event is we. Zizek is great in that he takes on so many potentially thorny topics, and in a perspicuous way, details his position while at the same time pointing out the faults in others’ positions. And he always has a program. Spiegelman is great for the opposite reason—his ambivalence.