Literature after 9/11

Ann Keniston, Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, Ann Keniston, Jeanne Follansbee Quinn

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135024659
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Literary Criticism

Drawing on trauma theory, genre theory, political theory, and theories of postmodernity, space, and temporality, Literature After 9/11 suggests ways that these often distinct discourses can be recombined and set into dialogue with one another as it explores 9/11's effects on literature and literature's attempts to convey 9/11.

Part I

Experiencing 9/11

Time, Trauma, and the
Incommensurable Event

1	Portraits of Grief Telling Details and the New Genres of Testimony Nancy K. Miller

In the summer of 2002, Times Books published a volume containing the 1,910 “Portraits of Grief” that had appeared in the New York Times between September 15 and December 31, 2001. The 1,910 stories that readers had consumed in the newspaper along with their daily breakfast or their morning commute were now compiled into a manageable archive and filed in alphabetical order. Rescued from the ephemera of the daily paper and the fluctuations of the Internet, the “Portraits” finally came to rest between hard covers.¹ In the prefatory material to the volume, editors and reporters characterize the work they did in creating this popular and much-remarked-on journalism. Their commentary both describes how the genre came into being and provides a frame through which the “Portraits” should be read.

Almost immediately after the disaster of September 11, 2001, the frantic search for missing persons took the form of flyers identifying the missing. These home-made artifacts were hurriedly pasted onto walls, mailboxes, lampposts, and phone booths, papering the walls of bus shelters and train stations. In addition to detailed physical descriptions, the flyers typically included photographs of the loved ones, almost always smiling. (see Figure 1.1.) As the hope of finding survivors faded, the distinction between the missing and the dead began to blur. It is no doubt for this reason that as of the second day of reporting, the original title of the series, “Among the Missing,” with its implicit hope of recovery disappeared to become “Portraits of Grief.” Given their spontaneous and multiple origins, the flyers varied widely in size, style, and presentation. The newsprint versions of necessity were uniform. As in a high school yearbook, everyone memorialized was given equal space and equal treatment.

How could readers be made to care daily about the individual dead who, unlike the subjects of traditional New York Times obituaries, were neither eminent nor glamorous? At the one-month anniversary of the profiles, an editorial titled “Among the Missing” analyzed the newspaper’s attempts to master the civilian trauma. Faced with the massive numbers of victims, the editors pondered the best strategy for identifying the singularity of each life within the constraints of the form: “Each profile is only a snapshot, a single

Figure 1.1 Grand Central Station Memorial Wall, October 24, 2002, Lorie Novak.

still frame lifted from the unrecountable complexity of a lived life” (D12). On the first day of reporting the losses, the metaphor of photography had also figured—recalling the effect of the flyers: “Snapshots of Their Lives, With Family and at Work” ran the headline (A11).

In the Introduction to the volume, Janny Scott, the reporter chiefly responsible for the earliest coverage of the victims, makes explicit the connection between the “Portraits” and the flyers, the verbal and the visual. “We began,” she explains,

dialing the phone numbers on the flyers. What we wanted were stories, anecdotes, tiny but telling details that seemed to reveal something true and essential about how each person lived…. The profiles … were closer to snapshots—concise, impressionistic, their power at least as much emotional as intellectual. And they were utterly democratic. (ix)

Scott continues to make the analogy to the visual medium as she looks for a metaphor to render the vast undertaking. “Like a panoramic photograph, the project gathered everyone it could and attempted to bring each one fleetingly into focus” (ix). Howell Raines, the Times’s executive editor, also embraces the discourse of photography in his Foreword to the volume: “I’m convinced,” he states, “that the core of the portraits’ appeal lies in our metropolitan desk’s decision to cast these stories as snapshots of lives interrupted as they were being actively lived, rather than in the traditional obituary form.” Most of the people who died would not have been the subjects of the traditional obituaries, he observes, a “powerful storytelling format in itself … entirely appropriate to the task of recording the key facts of prominent (or notorious) lives” (vii).

In these statements that self-consciously define the newspaper’s project, the visual trumps the verbal, almost as though the “newspaper of record” found itself at a loss for words, words suddenly seeming inadequate to the task of representing what makes an individual life a life, unable to convey its emotional truth. If not the classic obituary, then what? What shape to give to the stories? In the face of collective disaster, whose scale strained the imagination, the anecdote was seized upon as a mode suited to rendering the familiar acts of ordinary life. Like the snapshot, the anecdote, through the brevity of its narrative, catches life in its everyday dimensions. Like the snapshot, the anecdote’s appeal resides in its ability to carry both life and death, present and past: what once was but recalled to memory somehow still is.

Let’s return now to the language of reporter Janny Scott’s account of how the portrait genre was invented. “What we wanted,” she said, were “stories, anecdotes, tiny but telling details that seemed to reveal something true and essential about how each person lived.” The anecdote here is set up in apposition to the detail, but the two are not interchangeable; their relationship is not reversible. The effective anecdote requires details; but details by themselves do not necessarily add up to an anecdote. Nonetheless, in the slippery discourse about the “Portraits,” it is no easy matter to separate anecdote from detail. The anecdote might even be said to serve as a telling detail in a life’s interrupted story.

In January 2002, the New Yorker devoted a column to the portraits, fleshing out some of the back story on the reporting and the reporters. Here (unlike Howell Raines’s recourse to the snapshot metaphor), the portrait of portrait making, as it were, retains its narrative function. Once again, the creation of the “Portraits”—the subject of some fascination—is retold … to a reporter. And again, the anecdote alternates with the detail but also introduces other generic references into a by-now familiar story: the birth of a genre. The reporters placed phone calls to the numbers displayed on the flyers in order to “glean details about the lives of a few hundred among the thousands of individuals who had disappeared.” The “Portraits” here are characterized as “mini-profiles” and the first batch of them as vignettes—“twenty vignettes, averaging less than two hundred words each.” The “Portraits” are further described as “sketches”—picking up the pictorial code—“sketches that revealed an emblematic, usually endearing anecdote or character trait” (Singer 30). In this context, the “Portraits” conform to the dictionary definition of the anecdote: “[A] usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or curious incident, often biographical and generally characterized by human interest” (Webster’s). The anecdote has the right dimensions for evoking a brief life, which was mainly the case among the dead on September 11.

Editorial self-consciousness about the genre was immediate. For if the “Portraits” sprang up spontaneously, their production was not unsupervised. One month into the daily practice (around the time of the newspaper’s editorial, “Among the Missing,” referred to earlier), a memo was circulated “admonishing contributors to avoid certain tropes.” Reporters were encouraged to “reach for illuminating details” beyond the “bond traders who loved their wife and kids,” the perks of “the Cantor Fitzgerald guys,” and “how the deceased was such a devoted student of ‘The Simpsons’ or Bruce Springsteen” (Singer 31). Jan Hoffman, a reporter who turned in a large number of the “Portraits,” says that what got to her on the phone with the survivors (“I have never wept so much while working,” she confesses), was “the crispness of their memories, the way they described these poignant, funny, heroic moments.” As she reflects upon the forensics of eliciting responses, Hoffman explains her methods: you have to listen patiently “until you have that click where you cansee the person and how they moved on the planet” (31). The desirable response for the “Portraits of Grief,” we might say, supplies narrative DNA.

Here is an example from a set of “Portraits” published in early December 2002 about Steven Schlag:

When a neighbor was in her third pregnancy and uncomfortably late, Mr. Schlag, 41, a partner with Cantor Fitzgerald who lived in Franklin Lakes, N.J., whipped up his chicken cacciatore, which had helped his wife go into labor. (It didn’t do the trick for the neighbor.) And when a friend was scheduled for cancer surgery on Sept. 11, 2001, Mrs. Schlag recalled, her husband bought two copies of the bicyclist Lance Armstrong’s autobiography and told his friend, “We’re both going to read this, and you’re going to get through it.” (B54)

An internal gloss of the “Portrait” by the widow generates its title: “She related a trademark attitude of his,” the reporter observed, “which she and their three children…. are trying to live by now. ‘Strangers would come up to him when he was skiing and ask, “How are the conditions at the top?”’ she said. ‘He’d always say, “It’s 88 and sunny.”’ “That was his favorite saying.”’” That saying became the newspaper’s caption.

Tied to family and friends, beloved of coworkers, the victims were also smiling in the memory of those who survived them, not just in the snapshots. Nonetheless, traces of sadness of course punctuate the mourners’ narratives, and often provide an underlying sense of irony. Here’s one other from December 2002 about Kevin Prior, “‘I’m always coming home.’” Like so many of the “Portraits,” this one is a love story.

Firefighter Prior’s cheerful hardheadedness surfaced again in 2001 atop a mountain in Ireland, the couple’s ancestral home. They both wanted to take a rock home from the peak back to New York, but each claimed to have found the perfect one. So they wound up taking both. When Firefighter Prior died in the World Trade Center, Ms. Noone [his fiancée] was glad they had two rocks. She kept one and put the other in his coffin. (B54)

If you have attended a funeral lately, or watched one on television, these anecdotes will sound familiar. Like the subject of the eulogy, the subject of the portrait always appears in a good, often humorous, light—and the story told, like the desirable details the reporters typically sought for, is meant to illuminate that something “true and essential,” Mr. Schlag’s “trademark attitude.” The trademark reveals something good, like virtue, often civic, or at least domestic. Not every single “Portrait” is organized anecdotally. Sometimes the details are not harnessed to a narrative. Rather, they provide points of entry into character: personality traits, habits, quirks, hobbies, mottoes, that are cumulative in effect but not shaped into a story. Almost all have a catchy signoff, however, that summarizes the victims and what they meant to the ones left behind in a kind of anecdotal degree zero, where nouns lack their verbs: “He was my plumber, my electrician, my seamstress,” a widow concludes. “My everything, really” (B54).

Like the eulogy, by giving formal dimensions to suffering, the “Portraits of Grief” create a coherent public persona to fit the event, and one that also serves to protect both the victim and the mourners from the display of unsuitable emotions. The genre takes the private person into the public arena within recognizable conventions, within what we might call an ethics of mourning: the “emblematic” anecdote is “endearing” not damning. What feels new about the portrait as genre, of course, is the fact that for the vast majority these private lives were not destined for the public space of the newspaper. In its etymology anecdote means unpublished—“items of unpublished or secret history or biography” (Webster’s). By passing through the scrim of the “Portraits of Grief,” the anecdote becomes what it was not meant to be: a public document. We are left with a paradox: the anecdotes extracted by the reporters were meant to bring the dead back to life—or at least to keep them alive—in the memories of the living. Is an anecdote still an anecdote once it is published? Or, in the end, are the “Portraits” really informal obituaries, and not a new genre after all?

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wonders about the “praise accorded to happiness” (27). Praise, he writes, “is proper to virtue or excellence, because it is excellence that makes men capable of performing noble deeds.” But then he goes on to add: “Eulogies, on the other hand, are appropriate for achievements of the body as well as of the mind. However, a detailed analysis of this subject is perhaps rather the business of those who have made a study of eulogies” (28–29). In the winter of 2002, I went to a play that had been created in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Anne Nelson’s The Guys, that staged the relation of the anecdote to the eulogy. A fire fighter feels overwhelmed by the number of eulogies he has to deliver at the funerals of the men from his company he has lost. He finds himself speechless with pain. A writer—a middle-aged woman—volunteers to help him put his anguish into words. He needs to figure out what to say “for them, for the families.” And he wants to describe the fireman in such a way that the families and the other men will “recognize” him. “Tell me about him,” the woman says. And the captain provides details—“the Waldorf salad for the church picnic,” the fireman’s “work, church, home” motto—scraps of memory, details, that the writer shapes into anecdotes. When one of the portraits makes the man seem too much of a hero and not sufficiently “human,” the captain objects—“he sounds too perfect.” What’s his flaw, then? “He was a perfectionist!” When the captain reads aloud the portraits the writer has devised, he has delivered the eulogy.

Unlike the obituary, which presents life in the past tense like a plot that has come to its end, the anecdote, however narrative in form, remains closer to the structure of human character—which is probably why it is a staple of the eulogy. Paradoxically, perhaps, and for this reason, the anecdote feels timeless, life-like—alive with what’s always uniquely true of an individual—and why it fits a life that is too short to have discovered the shape of its own, singular plot. Nonetheless, incorporated into the “Portraits,” as in a eulogy, the anecdote is necessarily also a memento mori bearing a different message. It says: remember that one of the perfect rocks ended up in a coffin, having met the one plot that fits all and that therefore cannot be avoided.

I want now to pick up the thread of the “tiny but telling details” that reporter Janny Scott explained were the key to unlocking the mystery of an individual life, the details that would “reveal something true and essential about how each person lived.” This is reporter Jan Hoffman’s “click” of discovery, or perhaps, changing registers, the punctum of Rol...