09.04.27 In the Shadow of No Towers Notes
April 27, 2009
Is In the Shadow of No Towers Kafkaesque?
YES
-Media as means for conveying fear and sense of doom; fear is prolonged and never goes away because of these guys;
-Media as powerful controlling institution, they decide what is important for people to know, what people should think about,
-Kafka also writes about the intrusiveness of technology
-Sense of impending doom: repetition of trauma contributes to a similar feeling in Spiegelman- “sky is falling” “waiting for the other shoe to drop”
-Obsession: K and arrest/trial, Spiegelman and 9/11
NO
-Media is accessible, their motivations are discernible, you can still think what you want, not all-powerful, it’s a business, you can keep the media out of your life (Spiegelman actively seeks out media input)
-Presence of the past is not fundamentally Kafkaesque; the repetition of trauma assists with sense of impending doom but it doesn’t actually cause the sense of impending doom (in Kafka, there is usually one major traumatic event); the past is not a factor in Kafka, the future is the greater concern;
-Sense of doom: Spiegelman believes bad things are going to happen because bad things have always happened (see 8), whereas Kafka’s sense of doom comes as a change and it’s a sense of coming doom (bad thing hasn’t happened yet!)
-Trauma actually happens in Spiegelman’s world, but it is rare in Kafka
-Kafka’s fundamental aim is not that of Spiegelman, which is to help himself understand something that happened to him
-Frustrated search for meaning is missing- he looks for meaning after 9/11 and is dissatisfied with it, a completed and bitter quest
-Visible institution, but it’s nuts; figures of Bush make the sense of doom come from the powerful institution, whereas in Kafka the sense of doom comes from the inaccessibility of the institution
I completely agree that the points under the “NO” column be greater than the points under the “YES” column. As a small aside though, I was a little confused by your use of the word media in the “YES” list. A lot of the time in class i feel like we use the word media without really ever elaborating on what the media is; we speak of it as if its some windowless room somewhere operating on its own (like the super-computer in Welles’s film.” But the point that we, myself included, often overlook is that media is people with their own motives that show up in subtle biases and indecipherable ways. SO, to return to your point about media as a controlling institution, I cant see the “media” as being all that controlling. I dont find myself being controlled by Ruppert Murdoch.