9/11: Culture, Catastrophe and the Critique of Singularity

Diana Gonçalves

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783110473131
• eBook ISBN: 9783110477245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Even though much has been said and written about 9/11, the work developed on this subject has mostly explored it as an unparalleled event, a turning point in history. This book wishes to look instead at how disruptive events promote a network of associations and how people resort to comparison as a means to make sense of the unknown, i.e. to comprehend what seems incomprehensible. In order to effectively discuss the complexity of 9/11, this book articulates different fields of knowledge and perspectives such as visual culture, media studies, performance studies, critical theory, memory studies and literary studies to shed some light on 9/11 and analyze how the event has impacted on American social and cultural fabric and how the American society has come to terms with such a devastating event. A more in-depth study of Don DeLillo's Falling Man and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close draws attention to the cultural construction of catastrophe and the plethora of cultural products 9/11 has inspired. It demonstrates how the event has been integrated into American culture and exemplifies what makes up the 9/11 imaginary.

1.The Rhetoric of Catastrophe: Towards Representing 9/11

Where were you when it happened?

— Don DeLillo

Falling Man, p. 126

When a new catastrophe strikes, commonplace expressions such as “this is an unprecedented event”, “this is an unparalleled event”, “nothing like this has ever happened before” or “nothing will ever be the same” surface right away so as to illustrate one’s sense of shock, disbelief and non-comprehension regarding a circumstance of extreme impact. Such was the case with the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the Titanic in 1912, Pearl Harbor in 1941, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 and the explosion of the Challenger in 1986. Indeed, this was once again the case with September 11 in 2001. Reflecting on this idea of a turning point in history, in her essay “Memorializing Absence”, Marita Sturken observes that “[i]t has been said quite often since September 11 that Americans are standing at a juncture of history, that, on that date, the world changed forever into a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’ Such proclamations of radical breaks in historical consciousness have happened before, of course” (Sturken 2002: 374). The intention of not only this chapter but also, ultimately, of this book is discernible in this passage: to convey how, although catastrophe may be a contingent and situated event, its representation becomes part of cultural tradition. A catastrophe may present singular or extraordinary features such as the ability to radically alter history, yet its representation brings to light the realization that there is a pre-existing iconography or narrative employed in order to deal with these distinctive events. In this sense, the critique of singularity occurs at the reception’s end, namely through the observation and analysis of aesthetical processes that support and frame23 the rhetorical representation of those catastrophic events.

Moving further and farther, history is pervaded with natural and man-made catastrophes24 perceived as paramount moments, as singular events. In fact, their classification as catastrophes already constitutes a framing process. The use of this word to define the event is a means to categorize it and ascribe it with a number of characteristics: hence, employing the word “catastrophe” for these events corresponds to the attribution of a certain meaning, context, imagery and discourse that helps construct and structure the story of the latest event in a particular and specific way.25 It therefore serves as a means of emplotment.26

In general terms, no catastrophe is more intrinsically memorable or inherently meaningful than any other. There can always be, arguably, greater and more devastating catastrophes. Yet, given their timing (the exact time and space in which they take place), specific episodes manage to resist time and oblivion. The Lisbon earthquake, the Titanic, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and the Challenger represent such catastrophes. They were and still are identified as world-shattering moments, as events of deep and wide resonance that, due to their suddenness and magnitude, shocked the world at large. Moreover, they are said to have produced a shift of consciousness, changing the way people perceived their surroundings and the way people responded to and, ultimately, represented catastrophes. Taking all this into account, they function as a template to which people (governments, media and the public in general) return in order to understand the most recent catastrophe. It is my contention, therefore, that we need examples such as these to make sense of 9/11 – we need other texts and contexts to be able to read the present.

The current chapter focuses on both how the idea of catastrophe is constructed and how it is transferred over time and space. The purpose of this exercise is to investigate why certain catastrophes stand out and endure the test of time as an important component of collective memory and why they are constantly recalled by newer catastrophic events. I depart from the study of five catastrophes that have proven to be, directly or indirectly, rhetorically relevant to the way 9/11 has been portrayed and received. In order to properly deal with 9/11, journalists, scholars and ordinary witnesses went back to paramount catastrophes whose impact in their respective times was perceived as comparable to the impact of 9/11. They deployed them as a structure to address the unfamiliar and the unforeseen. The Lisbon earthquake, the sinking of the Titanic, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the bombing of Hiroshima and the explosion of the Challenger have been successively brought up in the aftermath of 9/11 and have provided a model for its representation, comprehension and significance. In the presence of an event that falls outside established parameters, these events have been called upon to endow it with a valid structure, to take hold of the unknown. Indeed, the fact that they all present different features (different origins, characteristics, consequences) benefits the receiver through widening the range of associations. The diversity of these references serves a double function. On the one hand, it confirms the event’s singularity: 1) it shows that ordinary language is insufficient to deal with it; and 2) it shows that its meaning is only attainable when in dialogue with what happened before. On the other hand, the diversity in the reference framework, which covers a wide spectrum of catastrophe types that historically tend to repeat themselves over the course of time but under different circumstances – earthquakes, fires, naval disasters, bombings, explosions –, brings more visibility to the similar response strategies used for coping with these catastrophes and the reactions they trigger. In this sense, this also challenges the very idea of singularity such events call forth.

Despite their intrinsic and extrinsic differences, as is argued here, these catastrophes do not need to be perceived as singular events for their cultural significance to be recognized. In the case of 9/11, the references to earthquakes, fires, technological disasters or even acts of war served both as reassurance (that something with similar features had already happened and could be overcome) and as a decisive factor in opposition to the inevitability of the event (proving that, if one had learned from the past, the present catastrophe could have been avoided or at least attenuated). Likewise, these references also act as a means of defying the traditional distinction between natural and man-made catastrophes by reviving circumstances that couple characteristics of both: catastrophic moments where natural catastrophe intertwines with human intervention and the action of nature and man is at times blurred (thereby allowing for natural disasters to escalate due to human error or unpreparedness); or man-made disasters whose effects are intensified due to the force of nature.27

The way people respond to a new event is always influenced and conditioned by how it has been done in the past. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, for example, has constituted an important template for framing the response to 9/11. Over time, the Lisbon earthquake has been considered the first big global catastrophe of the modern era not only for its magnitude and devastation but especially for its notoriety, as news about the event traveled rapidly around the world. On the morning of November 1, 1755, around 9:30 am, the earth trembled for the first time and caught by surprise thousands of Lisboners who had gathered in churches all around the city celebrating All Saints’ Day. It is estimated that, within a few minutes, thousands were dead (about 10,000 according to José Augusto França in Lisboa Pombalina e o Iluminismo). Additionally, two other earthquakes were felt in the following hours, along with a huge seismic sea wave (tsunami) and enormous fires that aggravated the already complicated scenario.

The earthquake of November 1, 1755 was experienced all over Europe and North Africa and there are even some reports – although never entirely confirmed28– that it was also felt on the Atlantic coast of the Americas. Despite its magnitude and the actual scale of its impact zone, it was not until the first news from Lisbon reached other European capitals days later that the real extent of the catastrophe became known.29 Indeed, the disruption of communications with the rest of Europe clearly demonstrates the severity of the quake and its consequences. Once the news spread, however, the most important (European) cities reacted to the event with shock, consternation and fear since, as Russell Dynes observes, the fall of Lisbon forced Europe to reassess the misleading notion that “[…] earthquakes were events that happened elsewhere” (Dynes 2005: 34).

The reaction of shock and dismay to the earthquake took effect in the writings of a number of European authors who wrote either directly about the earthquake or took it as a source of inspiration.30 Literary narratives about the events of 1755 presented three distinct perspectives: the scientific approach, which is characterized by the critical analysis of the event; the humanitarian approach, which focuses on the people affected by the catastrophe; and the religious approach, which holds human beings accountable for the catastrophe, proposing to explore it as God’s punishment (James and Kozak 2005: 32–33).31

At the time of the quake, Lisbon was a vital and strategic city. The fourth largest city in Europe and one of the continent’s key seaports, it was widely known for its wealth, religious import and commercial activity. One reason this particular episode became so notorious was because such a devastating event was completely unimaginable to most Europeans: such things only happened elsewhere. Nevertheless, when Lisbon, a major European city and capital of one of the largest colonial empires, was destroyed, it became a possibility for most Europeans. In this sense, owing to its characteristics and especially to its aftermath and the way it was received, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 became a paradigm of catastrophe. One might ask, however, what is the importance of this specific earthquake to the United States, and specifically to the study of 9/11, considering the enormous intrinsic differences of the events, a natural catastrophe in opposition to a man-made one, as well as the spatial-temporal distance between them. The answer is indeed quite simple. Given its immense international impact, which ensured it a place in history as the first global catastrophe of modern times, and the fact that intellectuals continuously return to it to make sense of other world-shattering catastrophes, the Lisbon earthquake is not only important to Portuguese or European history but to the history of modern times, representing a model for future responses to catastrophe.32

In relation to the Titanic, this example is especially recaptured due to the parallels one can draw in terms of finding vulnerability in a self-entitled invulnerable space, as well as in terms of rule alterations that directly result from the catastrophe or the attention to the realm of the personal when telling its story. Very briefly, on April 14, 1912, the White Star liner RMS Titanic, the largest ship ever built up to that point, struck an iceberg in the middle of the icy North Atlantic Ocean and sank after roughly three hours. The collision and sinking in her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York resulted in the death of about 1,500 people out of the more than 2,200 passengers and crew on board. The news of the sinking of the Titanic shocked the (Western) world, who at first refused to believe that the newest and biggest liner, the pride of the White Star Company, had sunk. First of all, because it was her first trip and she was packed with wealthy and renowned people (Europeans and Americans) eager to “make history” while crossing the Atlantic Ocean westward in the largest, fastest and most luxurious ship afloat; secondly, and probably most importantly, because the Titanic was considered “virtually unsinkable” – as her sister ship, the Olympic, forgotten to history, indeed turned out to be.33 As a matter of fact, after the disaster, the reference to “virtually” was dropped and the Titanic became known only as the “unsinkable” ship that actually sunk (Howells 1999: 4).

The most disturbing news, besides the sinking itself, was the great number of casualties. The death of about two-thirds of its passengers and crew was front-page news in newspapers around the globe. In fact, when it became evident that many more people could have been saved were it not for the insufficient number of lifeboats and for the fact that many of them were only partially filled, the astonishment and consternation grew even higher (Bryceson 1997). As in the Lisbon earthquake, the concern over the loss of human lives took a central role in representations of the catastrophe. Numerous books, films and even musicals have been written and produced to re-enact the events of that evening, focusing on the human dimension of the disaster, on human vulnerability vis-à-vis nature and technology. These stories both concentrate on the ship, generally presenting it as a mere space where the action develops, and on people, namely the first class male passengers, perceived as heroes for giving their own lives so their wives and children could survive (thus accepting agreed upon norms and traditions), the brave crew members that maintained order amongst bedlam, the agitators of the steerage class, the captain that went under with his ship, and the ship owner who allegedly jumped into a lifeboat.34

As far as Pearl Harbor is concerned, on the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor (Hawaii), catching the American Army and Navy forces completely unprepared. Taken by surprise, much of the Pacific Fleet (battleships, cruisers, and aircrafts) was damaged or destroyed. The attack killed over 2,000 people and wounded another thousand. The attack on Pearl Harbor was portrayed, and still is to this day, as an unprovoked sneak attack on the US. As George Victor contends: “[…] the idea of the sneak attack served two important functions. It helped Americans overcome their fear and despair by reaffirming their belief that the United States was more powerful than Japan and had been defeated because she was taken by surprise” (Victor 2007: 12).

As a consequence of the attack, the United States declared war on Japan and entered World War II under the unifying slogan “Remember Pearl Harbor”. In the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “a day which will live in infamy”.35 This type of discourse based on the idea of Americans as a community and the United States as the promised land of freedom and happiness, reminiscent of the rhetoric used by the Founding Fathers, is present in many American catastrophes36 and has become an intrinsic part of the American governmental response to catastrophic events, even more recent ones such as 9/11. In fact, the association between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 was almost instantaneous: they were both seen as gratuitous sneak attacks and, above all, attacks that were not directed at specific American institutions but at the United States at large and at the values it defends. By targeting vital operative structures that also entail a profound symbolism, the 9/11 terrorists tried to weaken the US financial, military and political strength, and ultimately, its social and cultural influence. The fact that the chosen targets simultaneously function as cultural and social symbols, as important landmarks that serve as reference points to both Americans and foreigners, also helps accentuate the idea of a psychological and emotional assault underlying the physical destruction. Corroborating this argument, in his September 20, 2001 speech, President George W. Bush declared: “On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. Am...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction: September 11 and the Critique of Singularity
• 1. The Rhetoric of Catastrophe: Towards Representing 9/11
• 2. Out of the Blue: The Exceptionality of 9/11
• 3. Covering Catastrophe: 9/11 as a Media Event
• 4. Collapsing the Boundaries of Literature: 9/11 Fiction
• Epilogue: Rereading September 11 as a Non-Singular Event
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index of Names
• Endnotes