by Jon Lackman | 22 March 2007 | Contemporary, Theory
The Winter 2007 Representations features an article by Katalin Orbán on “Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers“: “[these are] parallel books, devoted to historical crisis as family history — the former to the Holocaust, the latter to the attack on the World Trade Center — both narrated through the experiences of the author’s family … The link between the two books as cases of traumatic memory is made explicit in a panel of No Towers through the ‘indescribable’ smell, a challenge to representation … ‘I remember my father trying to describe what the smoke in Auschwitz smelled like’ … While [both books] attempt to resolve their image problems by using the image against itself … they adopt two very different strategies … Finally, however, the distinct uses of the image in the two books reveal an even more important underlying continuity: an effort to reorient the reader from the ‘awesome’ sublime to a more contingent history that does not transcend material bodies and traces.” In her concluding paragraph, Orbán writes: “The revaluation of the particular, the material, and the proximate through haptic visuality is an important imaginative attempt, despite its possible shortcomings, to sidestep the logic of simulation and loose association and to set limits to the sublime spectacle. This effort to see differently, if pursued beyond the local landscape of American narcissism or purely private trauma, can make room for a larger shift in the representation of trauma and historical crisis.”
