It's that time of year again. Despite it being the 10th anniversary of September 11, I didn't quite realize the anniversary was coming up until I started seeing the news stories.
Even a decade after the fact, it's still so very, very hard to write about 9/11, partly because the story of that day has become a grand national narrative. It's hard to write about 9/11 without being overtaken by that grand narrative: it's a little like trying to take a contrarian view of July 4, 1776; or shed additional light on August 15, 1945 (the day Japan surrendered, ending WWII). With these kinds of events, we know how the story is supposed to go. And we, the readers, want the story to go that way. (Perhaps our collective wanting is what fashioned this narrative in the first place.)
Which is why I have to admire articles like the Scientific American post - rather contrarian - that suggests that our memories of highly emotional events are unlikely to be as accurate as we'd like to think. The researchers aren't breaking new ground - any police investigator who tries to identify a suspect from sketches based on witness statements knows that this theory affects practice - but it's still bold to suggest that we might not be remembering 9/11 as clearly as we'd like.
It's a bold suggestion, but for entirely emotional reasons, I still find it distasteful. I doubt Mayor Bloomberg is going to consecrate the 9/11 memorial with researcher Elizabeth Phelps' immortal words: "All you can say is that data would suggest your memory's wrong." But the interview is an interesting read, and it's good to talk about stuff like this.
Then there's the intriguing article by Susanne Craig in NYTimes' DealBook. Craig takes on the difficult task of justifying - or perhaps just explaining - the story of Cantor Fitzgerald, the business that lost the most employees on September 11. It's a brilliant concept and she executes it beautifully, although one could argue that no one but a business paper could get away with a sympathetic profile of Howard Lutnick.
The narrative runs against the flow of what we expect from September 11 stories. We expect unvarnished, boldface heroes: the firefighters who gave their lives, the neighbors who flung open their doors to the needy, the hundreds who lined up at the barricades to donate quarts and quarts of blood, the single bugle player who plucked out the lonely melody of "Taps" atop the wreckage on that memorable and dusty morning after. (There are the villains, too, but in classic American fashion we ignore them.)
This is a story told in broad strokes, in black and white, but Craig's story is fine-grained and gray. In many people's eyes what Lutnick did was WRONG, and Craig does not tell these people that they should feel differently. What she does is trace the effect of September 11 - that day of black and white stories - into the somewhat shadier realm of "what happened next." September 11 forced some people to make very morally difficult decisions. It's good to talk about that, too.
At the same time, Craig's story follows a path that we as a nation would like to believe still exists, even though we seem to have lost sight of it recently. Under the 9/11 varnish, Lutnick's is the story of the Great American Dream, the kind of stuff that Horatio Alger wrote about and Andrew Carnegie made real. Lutnick is a perfect hero because he is an unlikely one: ruthless, misunderstood, but ultimately redeemed by his hidden compassion. In this, he's not American so much as Dickensian, the perfect inversion of Aristotle's tragic hero.
One of my favorite 9/11 narratives by far is "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." Jonathan Safran Foer has his detractors, and his novels always make me cry (once, memorably, on a train through the Italian countryside, while seated across the aisle from a friendly elderly couple who were clearly distressed but didn't know how to express their concern.) I don't remember the novel clearly enough to critique it, but I remember that the main character was a child, and that his fixation on a single image from the attacks - that photo of a man upended and falling from one of the towers - was a perhaps too-perfect metaphor for the nation after September 11. (And the worst you can say of Jonathan Safran Foer is that his metaphors are sometimes too perfect) The novel's emotional heft derived from the contradictory motion embodied in that famous photo - we knew the man was falling, and we knew what what he was falling away from - but in the picture he hovered like an astronaut in a strange in-between location where gravity didn't exist. That was the too-perfect metaphor, at least for a little while, at least emotionally (of course, what Craig's story above reminds us is that the metaphor was maybe not that perfect)
(Another famous 9/11 novel, "the Emperor's Children" by Claire Messud, I barely even remember, except that I thought at the time it was extremely underwhelming)
And finally, rounding out the list, is another personal favorite: Richard Howard's poem "Fallacies of Wonder." Howard deals with language the way only a translator can, with a deep appreciation for the weird moments in which that which is most familiar can become most strange to us. (That's another too-perfect metaphor for September 11 - what isn't?)
But Howard manages to reconcile the opposing September 11 narratives with a glibness that in anyone other than a poet would seem Orwellian, a bit too doublethink. He writes:
"In the end,
nothing remembered can be true, although
only what is remembered can be real."
The purpose behind September 11 stories, at the end of the day, is maybe to prove Howard right. Maybe it doesn't matter if our memories are true (in the manner that scientists measure such things) because it is the existence of our collective memory, that shadow of national sorrow that still hovers over everything from our national politics to our personal opinions, that is real. Writing is part of the collective act of remembering, because as any writer can tell you, the purpose of the act is to both magnify and distill our memories, in the hopes of somehow extracting from them something that the world can call "real."
Even a decade after the fact, it's still so very, very hard to write about 9/11, partly because the story of that day has become a grand national narrative. It's hard to write about 9/11 without being overtaken by that grand narrative: it's a little like trying to take a contrarian view of July 4, 1776; or shed additional light on August 15, 1945 (the day Japan surrendered, ending WWII). With these kinds of events, we know how the story is supposed to go. And we, the readers, want the story to go that way. (Perhaps our collective wanting is what fashioned this narrative in the first place.)
Which is why I have to admire articles like the Scientific American post - rather contrarian - that suggests that our memories of highly emotional events are unlikely to be as accurate as we'd like to think. The researchers aren't breaking new ground - any police investigator who tries to identify a suspect from sketches based on witness statements knows that this theory affects practice - but it's still bold to suggest that we might not be remembering 9/11 as clearly as we'd like.
It's a bold suggestion, but for entirely emotional reasons, I still find it distasteful. I doubt Mayor Bloomberg is going to consecrate the 9/11 memorial with researcher Elizabeth Phelps' immortal words: "All you can say is that data would suggest your memory's wrong." But the interview is an interesting read, and it's good to talk about stuff like this.
Then there's the intriguing article by Susanne Craig in NYTimes' DealBook. Craig takes on the difficult task of justifying - or perhaps just explaining - the story of Cantor Fitzgerald, the business that lost the most employees on September 11. It's a brilliant concept and she executes it beautifully, although one could argue that no one but a business paper could get away with a sympathetic profile of Howard Lutnick.
The narrative runs against the flow of what we expect from September 11 stories. We expect unvarnished, boldface heroes: the firefighters who gave their lives, the neighbors who flung open their doors to the needy, the hundreds who lined up at the barricades to donate quarts and quarts of blood, the single bugle player who plucked out the lonely melody of "Taps" atop the wreckage on that memorable and dusty morning after. (There are the villains, too, but in classic American fashion we ignore them.)
This is a story told in broad strokes, in black and white, but Craig's story is fine-grained and gray. In many people's eyes what Lutnick did was WRONG, and Craig does not tell these people that they should feel differently. What she does is trace the effect of September 11 - that day of black and white stories - into the somewhat shadier realm of "what happened next." September 11 forced some people to make very morally difficult decisions. It's good to talk about that, too.
At the same time, Craig's story follows a path that we as a nation would like to believe still exists, even though we seem to have lost sight of it recently. Under the 9/11 varnish, Lutnick's is the story of the Great American Dream, the kind of stuff that Horatio Alger wrote about and Andrew Carnegie made real. Lutnick is a perfect hero because he is an unlikely one: ruthless, misunderstood, but ultimately redeemed by his hidden compassion. In this, he's not American so much as Dickensian, the perfect inversion of Aristotle's tragic hero.
One of my favorite 9/11 narratives by far is "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." Jonathan Safran Foer has his detractors, and his novels always make me cry (once, memorably, on a train through the Italian countryside, while seated across the aisle from a friendly elderly couple who were clearly distressed but didn't know how to express their concern.) I don't remember the novel clearly enough to critique it, but I remember that the main character was a child, and that his fixation on a single image from the attacks - that photo of a man upended and falling from one of the towers - was a perhaps too-perfect metaphor for the nation after September 11. (And the worst you can say of Jonathan Safran Foer is that his metaphors are sometimes too perfect) The novel's emotional heft derived from the contradictory motion embodied in that famous photo - we knew the man was falling, and we knew what what he was falling away from - but in the picture he hovered like an astronaut in a strange in-between location where gravity didn't exist. That was the too-perfect metaphor, at least for a little while, at least emotionally (of course, what Craig's story above reminds us is that the metaphor was maybe not that perfect)
(Another famous 9/11 novel, "the Emperor's Children" by Claire Messud, I barely even remember, except that I thought at the time it was extremely underwhelming)
And finally, rounding out the list, is another personal favorite: Richard Howard's poem "Fallacies of Wonder." Howard deals with language the way only a translator can, with a deep appreciation for the weird moments in which that which is most familiar can become most strange to us. (That's another too-perfect metaphor for September 11 - what isn't?)
But Howard manages to reconcile the opposing September 11 narratives with a glibness that in anyone other than a poet would seem Orwellian, a bit too doublethink. He writes:
"In the end,
nothing remembered can be true, although
only what is remembered can be real."
The purpose behind September 11 stories, at the end of the day, is maybe to prove Howard right. Maybe it doesn't matter if our memories are true (in the manner that scientists measure such things) because it is the existence of our collective memory, that shadow of national sorrow that still hovers over everything from our national politics to our personal opinions, that is real. Writing is part of the collective act of remembering, because as any writer can tell you, the purpose of the act is to both magnify and distill our memories, in the hopes of somehow extracting from them something that the world can call "real."
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