Reconstruction 11.2 (2011)
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Re-Writing Ourselves in the Wake of 9/11 / Mark J. Noonan
Abstract: Following 9/11, V.S. Naipaul claimed that the novel's time was over, for only nonfiction "could capture the complexities of today's world." Nonetheless, a steady stream of novels began appearing seeking to frame a useful response to unimaginable terror and heartbreak including Colum McCann’s Let the World Spin, DeLillo’s Falling Man, John Updike’s Terrorist, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. This essay examines several of these works to discuss how and why American fiction changed after 9/11. Specifically, it will analyze the disappearance of irony and social satire, replaced by a new emphasis on "bearing witness," a form of ethical consciousness that moves away from empty empathy. It will also focus on other shared elements including the multiple uses of memory to contain and confront trauma; the simultaneous striving for—and ambivalence towards—human interconnection; as well as the inability to communicate in traditional ways. Finally, the essay will address the many failures of 9/11 fiction: the frequent reduction of 9/11 to a familial tragedy (inward looking); the promotion of ethnic culture in a colonial, rather than post-colonial vein; and a return to preexisting literary patterns that are, ultimately, evasive rather than constructive. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad alone, I argue, is a notable exception to such shortcomings.
Keywords: Communication Culture Studies, Literature
But I would not say
a word until I could set aside all I know or believe about
nations, war, leaders, the governed and ungovernable;
....First I would freshen
my tongue, abandon sentences crafted to know evil
...I would purge
my language of hyperbole...
...I must not claim
false intimacy or summon an overheated heart glazed
just in time for a camera. I must be steady and I must be clear,
knowing all the time that I have nothing to say...
—Toni Morrison "The Dead of September 11" (149)
<1> On September 11, 2001 at 8:46 a.m., Al Qaeda suicide hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the northern facade of the North Tower. Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., a second team of hijackers crashed United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower. In the collapse of both buildings, 2,595 lives were lost. Completed in 1972, few had really cared that much for Minoru Yamasaki’s 1,350 feet matching aluminum pillars, but after that "worst day," American attitudes—along with the narrative of America itself—would change, in part because so many now had their own narratives to tell and were compelled to tell them.
<2> The question of "what had happened" was the first story to emerge. When the first plane had hit, many presumed it was an accident. But by the time the second plane appeared, we were all "a little older and wiser" as Don DeLillo in Falling Man puts it. A media storm would subsequently direct our understanding of the event. As Susan Faludi writes, on television and in the electronic media, "gruesome visuals of the calamity" were "replayed day after day" alongside bromides that "everything had changed." Rather than reflect deeply on what the trauma had meant to our national psyche, "the cultural troika of media, entertainment, and advertising declared the post 9/11 age an era of neofifties nuclear family ‘togetherness,’ redomesticated femininity, and reconstituted Cold Warrior manhood" (3-4). Whereas this narrative would supply the political justification for a two-pronged war in the Middle East and a clamping down on personal rights at home, writers of fiction were slower to react to the events leading to and from 9/11.
<3> For many novelists, inertia had set in. In his Nobel Prize speech given in October of 2001, V.S. Naipaul claimed that the novel's time was over, for only nonfiction "could capture the complexities of today's world." Writing for Harper’s Magazine a few months later, DeLillo in "In the Ruins of the Future" also suggested the difficulty of penning fiction after 9/11. For him real life tales "on the margins" were the ones that now mattered: "The cell phones, the lost shoes, the handkerchiefs mashing in the faces of running men and women.…The paper that came streaming out of the towers and drifted across the river to Brooklyn back yards: status reports, resumes, insurance forms. Sheets of paper driven into concrete, according to witnesses" (35). Seemingly these stories were the appropriate gestures "against the massive spectacle that continues to seem unmanageable, too powerful a thing to set into our frame of practiced response." William Gibson, who in fact had started his novel Pattern Recognition just prior to 9/11, also found his keyboard frozen. As he explained in an interview, "I actually sat down at my computer and looked at the manuscript and it was like it had been sort of reverse-obsoleted or something…. There’s not even a word for it. It had been back-cancelled" (6). Yet, as Colum McCann expressed at a NYC book reading for his own 9/11 novel, the word fiction in Latin simply means "to make." And slowly but surely a steady stream of novels were in fact made, or in the case of Gibson re-made, hoping to frame a credible response to unimaginable terror and heartbreak including McCann’s Let the World Spin, DeLillo’s Falling Man, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, John Updike’s Terrorist, and most recently, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad.
<4> The problem of authorship in the post 9/11 era was of course no longer the subject matter. Gibson in fact found that by using 9/11 as a theme, he had been able to give his protagonist, initially suffering a post-traumatic affect of "some kind," a more believable emotional correlative. The issue was, as Toni Morrison expresses in her poem "The Dead of September 11," how to speak on this topic sympathetically yet authentically, in a new structure and form, and in a new language demanded by the age of terrorism. There had been a cataclysmic shift in how people viewed the world—its past, present, and future—and creative writing would have to reflect this radical change in order to succeed. This essay, originally a talk given at St. John’s University’s New York campus, just across the street from Ground Zero, is a brief critical overview of the field of post 9/11 fiction, now ten years after the event. As I argue, many works published in the wake of 9/11 sought to address this new reality, but often were prone to nostalgic excess and reified the very event they were trying to reconstruct.
<5> One of the bolder fictional responses to 9/11, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was also one of the first. Though excoriated by several leading critics as overly sentimental and "forced" ("extremely long and incredibly boring" went one review), the novel is in fact a tour de force in a number of ways. It mostly succeeds, I believe, because of its attempt at what Bakhtin would call a "radical reaccentuation" of imaginative structure as well as its ability to evoke a portrait of grief that deeply affected its many readers, old and young. To attest to this, my talk began by showing a homemade film trailer made by high school students, who had been deeply affected by the work, a touching work of art in and of itself.
<6> The novel centers on the story of a precocious nine-year-old named Oskar Schell, who lost his father in the collapse of the North tower. First to check the family answering machine, Oskar on that day listens to four messages from his father announcing that something had happened but he was safe for the moment. He calls again the fifth time, but Oskar is too frozen in fear to answer. Subsequently, without telling anyone about the messages, he replaces the answering machine with an identical one. For the next year, whenever he is alone, he listens to the messages while standing in his father’s closet "because it made my boots lighter to be around his things, and to touch stuff that he touched" (36). Inside the closet he also finds a key in an envelope with only "Black" written on it. This key is the beginning of Oskar’s quest across the boroughs to find the mystery of its owner; in visiting all the "Blacks" in the phone book, Oskar believes he will somehow become closer to his dad.
<7> Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close exhibits many of the elements found in subsequent works of 9/11 fiction. We see fragments of memory associated with a loved one; a striving for human interconnection and a quest for understanding; we see tensions arising over new human alliances; a focus on language—more specifically—the inability to communicate in traditional ways. Preeminently, however, the book suggests another effect on art in the aftermath of trauma: what Athena Devlin calls a transformed way of viewing the world—that of bearing witness.
<8> In "9/11 and the Politics of Bearing Witness," Devlin observes that the single difference between literature and art before 9/11 and after is a new awareness that being a dispassionate spectator of human events no longer suffices. Devlin points to the amateur photography show New York: A Democracy of Photographs (exhibited at various venues throughout the city) that took to heart the new imperative that making art meant taking action. The photographs depicting the tragedy "sought to resist the spectacular nature of the event" and raise a "kind of ethical consciousness—indeed a moral position—that moves us away from ‘empty empathy.’" This attempt by ordinary citizens to actively respond to history also served to work collectively through the guilt of inaction helping "those affected but not destroyed" by trauma.
<9> In line with Devlin, Oskar’s journey to find "Black" in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a moral and collective act that connects him to a large variety of souls, suffering from different sources of grief. There is Mr. Black, a 103-year-old who hasn’t left his apartment since his wife died. There is the story of Mrs. Black getting accustomed to life as a divorcee; there is the final Mr. Black who is responsible for selling the vase with the key in it in the first place. The vase had belonged to Mr. Black’s father, who in life, was emotionally absent. The son consequently sells the vase to Oskar’s father on Sept. 10 at a tag sale, not knowing that the envelope in the vase contains a key to a safe in which the father has placed a letter expressing his true feelings for his son. By finding the owner of the key, Oskar, in his pursuit of self-help, helps in turn to heal Mr. Black. Oskar’s quest to heal also helps his mother, who is secretly aware of her son’s actions and associations. She also unwittingly wears a bracelet that Oskar has made for her with links in Morse Code of her husband’s last message. Oskar also plays an important role in helping to heal his grandfather, who has been unable to speak ever since his fiancé was killed in Dresden during WWII. If all of this sounds too complicated a narrative, it is, for the signal failing of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is its attempt to do too much. By following the lives of too many characters and embellishing the narrative with teasing graphics, passages of illegibly overwritten text, and even a soliloquy written entirely in numerical code, the novel is, for all its strengths, overdone and gimmicky.
<10> Also marred in one way or another were the succession of 9/11 novels to follow. The most anticipated of these novels were those by Don DeLillo and Jay McInerny, writers whose works have often drawn on New York for their setting and subject matter. In Underworld, DeLillo, for example, used the final game in the 1951 World Series between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers as a collective moment of "people’s history." The ball from the game-winning homerun—which DeLillo notes is "the exact same size" of the radioactive core of the Atomic bomb set off by the Soviets in that same year—is at once an emblem of an American pastime but also a reminder of competing forces on an international scale. Underworld was followed, in 2002, by Cosmopolis, a searing critique of global capitalism that disappointed readers expecting a more explicit response to 9/11. That book was Falling Man published in 2007. In it, DeLillo presents the disparate worlds of a 40-year-old lawyer who walks away from the rubble when the towers fell and Hammad, a Muslim hijacker who wavers in his disgust of Western hedonism paralleling Keith’s own wavering commitment to his ex-wife and son. Prior to 9/11, we learn that Keith was detached from his family. Though the event brings him home once again, he remains physically and emotionally distant, pursuing instead an affair with a fellow survivor, "a light-skinned black woman" (52). His own child, in contrast, continues to be referred to as "the kid" throughout the entire novel.
<11> Falling Man contains much of what is best about DeLillo, most notably his spare style and masterful use of dialogue. Speaking to her daughter who married Keith, for example, the mother says, "Keith wanted a woman who’d regret what she did with him. This is his style, to get a woman to do something she’ll be sorry for. And the thing you did wasn’t just a night or a weekend. He was built for weekends. The thing you did" (12). In these lines, the "thing she did" refers to marrying a man unsuited for marriage, a few short lines that reveal as much about Keith and his wife as it does the mother. In addition, the fictional performance artist known as the Falling Man—a man in a harness who falls from the sky headfirst across Manhattan locations—effectively summons the haunting and controversial AP image of a man falling from the North Tower. What works less well is the wholesale reduction of 9/11 to a domestic, familial tragedy, a failure that blights Jay McInerney’s The Good Life as well.
<12> Unlike DeLillo, McInerney more successfully links the complex fabric of couples in conflict to the larger panorama of the city in the wake of tragedy. What is most striking about McInerney’s work, however, is less the subject matter than the manner in which he tells his tale. Famous for many successful satires of New York’s elite class and glitterati, in this novel, the author consciously understood that writing after 9/11 had to be different. In his own response to Naipaul’s claim that fiction had nowhere to go, he argued that what actually was needed was a new style of writing fiction. As he writes, "Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-exanimation and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center." What he came to understand was that "certain forms of irony and social satire in which I’d trafficked no longer seemed useful." Accordingly, the title of his novel is not ironic. The work is in fact an attempt to depict two characters in two separate marriages, who find out what’s missing in their lives after meeting each other at a soup kitchen set up for 9/11 rescue workers. Corrine Calloway and Luke McGavock are each increasingly unhappy with the shallowness of their mates. While recognizing their own short-comings as part of the elite class and how they’ve contributed to their family’s unhealthy obsession with status and wealth, they also learn that they must ultimately help each other remain true to their families.
<13> In addition to asking readers to re-examine American materialism, the novel is also adept at showing how terrorism, at least temporarily, provokes disruptions of the existing order. As the city comes to feel more vulnerable, social and class differences are seemingly elided. The soup kitchen where Corrine and Luke meet exemplifies this manifestation of the city as a melting pot. It is here where Corrine befriends Captain Davies, a Brooklyn policeman. As McInerney writes:
Until a few days ago, the chances of their sharing a cup of coffee together would have been astronomically remote, but by now Corrine knew a great deal about Davies’s family, his boat, and the intricacies and inanities of the NYPD pension plan. (94)
Adjacent to the Ground Zero site, denizens who rarely would cross paths here exchange their stories.
<14> The theme of breaking down barriers and reaching across the aisle, so to speak, to better understand our collective humanity is also the centerpoint of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Perhaps because of this feel good theme, the work has been heralded by a score of leading critics who can’t seem to say enough about how brilliant a book this is. "Unendingly beautiful," "Remarkable…note-perfect," "a munificent, Rolex-calibrated beauty of Daedalian prose" are typical of the outspewing of praise the work has elicited. Dwight Garner in the New York Times writes how he "devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had." Another critic calls it, "A truly original glimpse into the city’s lesser known corners." For James Wood in the New Yorker it’s "…one of the most remarkable of post-colonial books." While certainly eloquent and moving at times, the last two critiques miss a central flaw of the work—a more than telling oversight, demanding additional commentary.
<15> The novel tells of, yes, another post 9/1l tale of divorce, in which an overbearing woman drives an emasculated white male into the arms of a non-white lover, for a short while at least. But this novel has colonial resonance, stolen perhaps from the southern plantation myth tradition of the 1880s and 90s: the male protagonist, a Dutch/English emigré named Hans van den Broek, finds additional solace slumming with the dark-skinned Trinidadian cricket player Chuck Ramkissoon and his motley crew of cricket players. His wife and son having returned to London, Hans, an equities analyst, is mesmerized by Chuck, a Gatsby-like self-promoter of mysterious origins, the moment they meet on a cricket field. In Hans’ own words:
We...were playing a bunch of guys from St. Kitts—Kittitians, as they’re called, as if they might all be followers of some esoterically technical profession. My own teammates variously originated from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. That summer of 2002, when out of loneliness I played after years of not playing, and in the summer that followed, I was the only white man I saw on the cricket fields. (10)
As Hans is taken in by Chuck’s vision of an International Cricket Field based in Brooklyn, he unwittingly comes to be his chauffeur for a numbers running racket that by the end of the novel leads to Chuck’s corpse being discovered in the Gowanus Canal. Prior to this tragic event, which Hans reads about once he is back in London, the two are the best of friends. Mostly, they explore almost every corner of Netherland together, that is, the outer borough of Brooklyn, or the Dark Continent if you will. During their drives, Chuck engages Hans in rambling political and cultural monologues that slowly bring the Dutchman out of his self-proclaimed "paralysis."
<16> In its flamboyant portrayal of Chuck and exquisite lines about life in New York, the novel rightly deserves the comparison to The Great Gatsby that many critics make, but its discomfiting promotion of ethnic culture as somehow more playful and purifying makes its legacy as one of colonial rather than post-colonial literature. The novel’s nostalgia for Dutch culture—at a time when the city itself has recently finished celebrations of Henry Hudson, who 400 years ago, sailed up the river named after him—is also problematic. The legacy of the Dutch deserves adulation but not a concomitant erasure of the fact of Dutch violence against Native Americans and their involvement in the slave trade upon their arrival, a part of history left out in this novel so starkly invested in revisiting origins.
<17> In "Multiculturalism as a Site of Suspicion," Jack Shuler calls attention to America’s long history of "harsh cultural and legal responses to public acts of violence." Connecting the Patriot Act all the way back to South Carolina’s response to the Stono slave rebellion of 1739, Shuler writes how "the ultimate goal of the Negro Act was to prohibit any narrative emanating from the African American community that posited alternatives to the slave regime, to racism, to violations of human rights" (263). His point, of course, is not to suggest that the attacks on 9/11 were in anyway justified but that shocks to the American system rarely lead us to look at the sources of our own culpability, quickly turning instead to knee jerk reaction and pre-existing patterns. Post 9/11 fiction, on occasion, seems to reflect this pattern. John Updike in Terrorist, for example, tries to view America from the perspective of Ahmad ("I’m Mad") Mulloy, the teenage son of an Irish American mother and Egyptian father, who, with the prodding of a local Imam, comes to despise the decadence and dissipation of the culture of his birth. The man who saves him from his anger—and from blowing up the Lincoln Tunnel—is an Ambassador of Liberalism, his guidance counselor Jack Levy. The novel is a serious attempt to view 9/11 from the perspective of a would-be terrorist, but the resulting story-line is ultimately absurd.
<18> As I have hoped to show in a small amount of space, too much in post-9/11 fiction is predictable, false, evasive of constructive solutions, and/or insufficiently inventive. For fans of science fiction, Gibson’s Pattern Recognition is an exception to these shortcomings, but, to me, it is Jennifer’s Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, that comes closest to meeting the writing challenges in the post 9/11 era as articulated in the Toni Morrison quote that begins this essay. Consciously summoning Proust’s Remembrance of Things Lost, the novel is concerned with memory and the passage of time, handling nostalgia without excessive sentimentality. Morrison claims a kind of humility in her piece, aware that she is not qualified to respond to the events on 9/11 before necessary time has elapsed and her education has begun anew, prejudices and preconceptions erased. Egan devotes much attention to the music industry in the novel, and is captivated by the connotations of pauses in rock songs, going so far as to chart frequency of musical pause in the late twentieth century. These pauses are an analogy for the necessary pause in fiction after 9/11. Egan’s novel, published ten years after 9/11, provides a markedly apolitical response, not condemning particular nations or leaders but abstract totalitarianism and its marketing.
<19> Most importantly, Egan does not privilege her own voice or any of her protagonists’ narrative, seeming to heed Morrison’s warning about recording the events surrounding a catastrophe monolithically. The chapters in A Visit From the Goon Squad are narrated by multiple characters, significant and insignificant, successfully averting the privileging of any individual perspective. At the end of the novel, Egan includes a chapter in Microsoft Powerpoint instead of traditional prose, suggesting the prevalence of technological vernacular and also further disusing any singular narrative authority. Other forms of technology, including text messages, capture communication between characters. The inclusion of contemporary and futuristic technologies in general, and text message vernacular in particular, simultaneously mitigate sentimentality and hyperbole, both sins Morrison warns against.
<20> Perhaps a result of the passage of time, Egan is "steady and clear" on the topic of 9/11. In an early chapter, two of her protagonists, Sasha and Bennie, drive past the empty space where the Twin Towers had been. The music producer Bennie remarks to his assistant, "They’ll put up something….When they’re finally done squabbling" (37). Their drive by Ground Zero represents not only the lack of architectural construction, but also the lack of a substantial response to the fall of the towers in fiction, the straining of art to come to terms with a new reality. A new paradigm of terror in reality required a new fiction to parse it. Pause.
I wish to thank Caroline Hellman for manuscript suggestions and Sean Scanlan for calling my attention to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.
Works Cited
DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007.
-----. "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September." Harper's Dec. 2001: 33-40. Repr. The Guardian (Manchester), 22 Dec. 2001: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4324579,00.html.
Devlin, Athena. "9/11 and the Politics of Bearing Witness." Unpublished essay.
Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
Garner, Dwight. Review of Netherland. New York Times. 5/18/2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/books/review/Garner-t.html.
McInerney, Jay. The Good Life. New York: Knopf, 2006.
-----. "The Uses of Invention." The Guardian. Saturday 17 September 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/sep/17/fiction.vsnaipaul.
Gibson, William. Interview with Fiona Graham. "Finding Faces in the Clouds." The Daily Telegraph. April 30, 2003. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3593416/ Finding-faces-in-the-clouds.html.
Morrison, Toni. "The Dead of September 11." Marjorie Agosin and Betty Jean Craige, Eds., To Mend the World: Women Reflect on 9/11. Buffalo: White Wine Press, 2002.
Naipaul, V.S. "Nobel Lecture". Nobelprize.org. 2 Sep 2010 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture.html.
O’Neill, Joseph. Netherland. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
Shuler, Jack. "Multiculturalism as a Site of Suspicion," Columbia Journal of American Studies. Vol. 9:1 2009.
Updike, John. Terrorist. New York: Random House, 2006.
Wood, James. "Beyond a Boundary." The New Yorker. May 26, 2008. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/05/26/080526crbo_books_wood.
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