Instead, the author-who appears in propria persona in the story and thus also functions as narrator-protagonist-has conveyed his impressions in a series of ten large outsize (9.5 by 14 inches), brightly colored plates or pages, which are themselves further divided into irregularly spread frames or panels. In the Shadow of No Towers is not a sequential narrative in graphic form, as Maus is. In order to compact personal experience and public outrage, Spiegelman has altered the usual comics format. As a result, he speaks with great passion both about the imprint the attacks left on his mind and about the immediate political follow-up, which, in his opinion, amounts to nothing less than a betrayal of the true meaning of 9/11. What is equally crucial to the shaping of this comics series is that Spiegelman witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers from a "ringside seat" (2). As David Hajdu wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "Spiegelman clearly sees Sept.11 as his Holocaust (or the nearest thing his generation will have to personal experience with anything remotely correlative), and in In the Shadow of No Towers makes explicit parallels between the events without diminishing the incomparable evil of the death camps"(13). Crucial to an understanding of this uneasy accommodation is the fact that Spiegelman is the son of two Holocaust survivors and that in an earlier, Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel, Maus, he succeeded in rendering the horrors of the concentration camps through the use of the comics medium, usually associated with "the very unserious, unsacred world of Loonytoons" (Gordon 84).
This paper will investigate by which means in his comics series In the Shadow of No Towers Art Spiegelman has succeeded in constructing a counter-narrative, 1 that is, a narrative that serves to reintroduce trauma into a new network of signification without normalizing or naturalizing the event.
The terrorist attack on America of 11 September 2001 has been widely interpreted as a limit event, an event so traumatic that it shatters the symbolic resources of the individual and escapes the normal processes of meaning-making and cognition.
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