Writing of 9/11, James Berger argues that “[n]othing adequate, nothing corresponding in language could stand in for it. No metaphor could carry language across to it. There was nothing to call it because it had taken reality over entirely.”Footnote ¹ The feeling that time had stopped, that history was over, innocence destroyed, the nation traumatized, and America altered forever dominated the immediate reaction to the attacks across critical, political, and media cultures in the United States. However, as we approach the ten-year anniversary of the event, more recent theoretical, literary, and commemorative reflections have done little to dispel the notion that 11 September 2001 was the day on which The Sky Changed Forever.Footnote ² This paper addresses the enduring predominance of the themes of unrepresentability and rupture that have characterized responses to 9/11 across diverse cultural forums; questioning whether, in their ubiquity, such tropes suggest a crisis of representation: a crisis engendered less by the traumatic nature of the event itself than by the way in which the attacks have recurrently been illustrated as defying comprehension. In so doing, I consider whether the discourses of trauma from which these concepts derive may be said to mystify, rather than elucidate, the conditions of both analysis and experience.

On 12 September 2001, the New York Times suggested that, the previous day, “people in Lower Manhattan [had] witnessed the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the unthinkable.”Footnote ³ In 2003, the academic and psychoanalyst Dori Laub similarly asserted that 9/11 was “an event without a voice,” “an encounter with something that makes no sense”;Footnote ⁴ whilst Geoffrey Hartman, director of the Fortunoff Video Archive, refused to name 11 September or to engage in interpretation of what took place. He addressed it only through allusion: referring to “that day,” “that event,” conjuring the impression of an oblique, dateless, nameless occurrence that “put its mark on time as if an epoch had passed.”Footnote ⁵ Framing the attacks in this way serves to position them outside discourse, placing them into a realm in which words “don't suffice because the experience taps into helplessness known before words can be uttered to represent and contain experience.”Footnote ⁶ Such accounts posit 9/11 as a “limit event,” which Dominick LaCapra defines as “an event that goes beyond the capacity of the imagination to conceive or anticipate it.”Footnote ⁷ Whether 9/11 actually constituted a limit event is not the issue here (although the terms of this designation reflect a misguided tendency to inflate the attacks to something approaching genocide).Footnote ⁸ Rather, I want to emphasize that representations of 9/11 as a rupture in historical understanding predominate in both the immediate response of the mainstream media and the later analysis of academics and authors. This raises the unwelcome possibility that, in representing unrepresentability so absolutely, limit narratives threaten to create the very void in understanding they lament.

As literature relating to other historical atrocities accorded the definition of limit event (most notably, of course, the Holocaust) would suggest,Footnote ⁹ in the context of 9/11 the discourse of incomprehensibility has been repeatedly coupled with the concept of rupture.Footnote ¹⁰ Such analyses bestow the impression of 11 September 2001 as a seismic schism between an orderly and innocent prelapsarian America, and a horrifying and chaotic new reality in which, to borrow a phrase from Joyce Maynard's post-9/11 novel, “The usual rules just don't apply anymore.”Footnote ¹¹ As occupational therapists Susan W. Coates, Daniel S. Schechter and Elsa First comment in the analysis of their work with traumatized children and their families in Lower Manhattan following the attacks, “The destruction of WTC [World Trade Center] was uniquely unbelievable in ways that many have tried to articulate. It was instant wisdom that the world had changed utterly.”Footnote ¹²

This perspective has influenced the thought of a diverse range of critics, including mental health practitioners, academics, and writers. In 2001, Don DeLillo described 9/11 as an event that “changed the grain of the most routine moment.”Footnote ¹³ Just days after the attacks, fellow novelist Jonathan Franzen recalled survivors “stumbling out of the smoke into a different world,”Footnote ¹⁴ whilst Jay McInerney saw his “view, and everything else, forever altered” by what had happened.Footnote ¹⁵ In his 2003 essay, Laub argued that on 9/11 “Normality abruptly ceased. Life as we have known it stopped,”Footnote ¹⁶ and, writing for the New York Times in 2007, N. R. Kleinfield declared that 11 September was “a day that marked the start of another time.”Footnote ¹⁷

This notion of rupture has provided a master theme for the emergent corpus of 9/11 literature. According to Keith Neudecker, protagonist of DeLillo's Falling Man, 9/11 cast New Yorkers irrevocably in “the light of what comes after.”Footnote ¹⁸ DeLillo portrays the attacks as a period of interruptive time; a suspended reality during which the character of New York City was irrevocably changed. Surveying the streets of Lower Manhattan shortly after the fall of the towers, Keith comments, “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.”Footnote ¹⁹ Shirley Abbott conveys a similar sense of dread-full pause in The Future of Love, as her protagonist, Mark, contemplates the Trade Center site in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Mark “was aware only of the gray stuff falling all around, silent snow, a blizzard to put an end to all school days, a snow day that might last forever.”Footnote ²⁰ Time, it seems, has stopped and the familiar coordinates of New York's spaces are fundamentally altered as the towers dissolve into ash.

This sudden fragmentation of both urbanity and history is represented as having destroyed the continuity of existence, severing the future from the past and, through this amputation, making the present appear only half-formed. As DeLillo's Keith notes immediately after the attacks, “There was something critically missing from the things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means.”Footnote ²¹ These texts imbue the reader with the impression that a yawning temporal void has opened before the characters; their battle becomes the struggle to traverse the distance between “before” and “after” without falling into its depths. Abbott's Mark, for example, feels himself to be entering “a new epoch”Footnote ²² in which everyday life “had been vaporized.”Footnote ²³ Watching the burning towers from the window of her Manhattan apartment, Suzannah Falktopf, protagonist of Helen Schulman's A Day at the Beach, comments that “she crossed the bridge from that life to this life” as she contemplated “the changed world” before her.Footnote ²⁴ Developing this sensibility, the narrator of Patrick McGrath's short story “Ground Zero” refers to 11 September as

Critiquing such representations, Susan Faludi writes that, “‘Everything has changed’ was our insta-bite mantra, recited in lieu of insight.”Footnote ²⁶ Faludi's comments suggest that the concept of rupture works to deter, rather than facilitate, understanding. There is something peculiarly unspecific about this apocalyptic rhetoric: an element that repels the historical perspective. Whilst the exact moment of transformation is hard to locate (was, it for instance, when the plane hit the north tower? The south? When the first tower collapsed? The second? At the moment of hijack? At takeoff? Such questions seem grotesque by their very nature), the reach of “9/11” – historically, geographically, and geopolitically – is delimited by the intense focus placed upon New Yorkers and the ruined sixteen acres of Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of the attacks. This fascination with fissure situates the attacks within a highly localized frame (both temporally and spatially) that deflects attention away from the global implications of the event, bestowing it instead upon the more intimate consequences of 9/11 for individual Americans, their families, and their communities. As we shall see, this sheltered, domestic realm forms the setting for many of the archetypal examples of “9/11 fiction.” However – perhaps more surprisingly – the rhetoric of the Bush administration also echoed this displacement of the attacks, drawing a clear connection between the home of the American citizen and their homeland (the wider “wounded” nation). As Faludi asserts, following the attacks, media reports were populated by homemakers

Rather than resulting from a dramatic paradigm shift occasioned by a moment of traumatic rupture, the roots of this introspective perspective can be found in American cultural phenomena pre-dating 11 September 2001. What appears to occur in the aftermath of 9/11 is a conflation of a particular school of critical theory and elements of political, memorial, and literary practice resulting from two related phenomena: the overextension of the attribution of trauma to national, even universal, levels, and the overpersonalization of the American public sphere. Both of these trends can be seen to precede 9/11 but became intensified in its aftermath, and each might be said to have its roots in cultural movements developing from a growing (critical and popular) interest in trauma since the early 1990s. The investigation of these possibilities, and the interrogation of the potential consequences of this slippage between the personal and the political, will form the remainder of this paper.

The responses to 9/11 upon which I shall focus are drawn principally from writers working in literary, psychoanalytic, and cultural practice and theory. In these areas of American studies, reactions to 9/11 and its aftermath have been marked by subscription to a limited number of critical perspectives, tending to fall into two camps, which may be reductively defined by a distinction between psychoanalytic and geopolitical analyses.Footnote ²⁸ This binary can be loosely separated into an empathetic, identificatory response from the American academy, and a less sympathetic backlash from European theorists critiquing the militaristic reaction of the Bush administration.Footnote ²⁹ This exegetical divide, while not absolute – as attested by the more extrospective analyses of Susan Sontag and Judith Butler, as well as the self-reflexive accounts of memorial culture proffered by academics working in the US such as Faludi and David Simpson – is unfortunate, as it has prevented the establishment of a mutually enriching dialogue about the attacks, engendering readings which, on the one hand, seem overly sentimental, and on the other, verge on negating the genuine suffering and loss arising from 9/11.Footnote ³⁰

This paper is principally concerned with the former strain of analysis, drawn from paradigms that emphasize the incomprehensibility of the attacks and the resulting traumatization of the American nation. It is important not to make blanket assumptions about the field of trauma, as to do so would risk homogenizing a remarkably diverse area of research that extends, in different forms, across a wide number of disciplines (cultural studies, literary studies, psychology, neurobiology, sociology, and media and film studies, to name just a few). However, I want to demonstrate an anxiety about the way in which particular characteristics of canonical trauma theory – ideas of unrepresentability, coupled with a conflation of historical and structural patterns of traumatization – appear to have been disconnected from their critical base, combined with notions of healing and redemption, and absorbed into various memorial and cultural discourses relating to 9/11. The resulting depoliticization of the field of trauma is somewhat surprising, as critics have traditionally viewed the traumatic pathology as possessing a subversive quality able to destabilize master narratives and, as Jenny Edkins asserts, to “reveal the contingency of the social order” by stripping away “the diverse commonly accepted meanings by which we lead our lives.”Footnote ³¹ In the case of 9/11, however, the ubiquity of traumatic narratives, and their entwinement with the discourses of the public–political sphere, appear to have neutered this counterhegemonic potential.

Always interested in questions of power and remembrance, the field of trauma studies arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s in response to a complicated array of loosely associated issues, including debates surrounding the remembrance of the Holocaust, European difficulties in assimilating troubling postcolonial legacies, the medical classification of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Vietnam veterans, and the extension of this category to victims of sexual and other abuse. Drawing upon models of repression inherited from Freudian psychoanalysis, post-structuralist concerns over the failure of referentiality, and postmodern questions about identity and subjectivity, trauma studies aimed to give expression to otherwise “unclaimed”Footnote ³² or inaccessible pasts.Footnote ³³

Cathy Caruth defines trauma as a pathology consisting “solely in the structure of its experience or reception,” arising from an event that “is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it.”Footnote ³⁴ Trauma, that is, testifies to the absence of an event from memory. The traumatic happening can be experienced only vicariously, in the form of flashbacks, sensory impressions, or dreams. Whilst ever-present, it carries with it a form of emptiness – a void in understanding, a refusal of linguistic embodiment. In its persistent yet intangible return, “the trauma thus seems to evoke the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence.”Footnote ³⁵ This insistence that history be viewed as a continuum of traumatic experience is perhaps the most contentious aspect of Caruth's writing. Arguing that the past becomes traumatic by virtue of its essential inexpressibility, Caruth asserts that for history “to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs.”Footnote ³⁶ Trauma, by this account, arises not from a particular tragedy or disaster, but as an inherent structural consequence of the impossibility of accurately representing or remembering any given event. As her various critics have suggested,Footnote ³⁷ in highlighting the allegedly traumatic character of all renditions of history, Caruth has “transformed the experience of trauma into a basic anthropological condition,”Footnote ³⁸ creating “a misleading symbolic equivalency between the allegedly traumatic component of all human communication and the concrete suffering of victims of physical and mental trauma.”Footnote ³⁹

Combined with Caruth's conflation of structural and historical traumata is the tendency of contemporary culture (epitomized by television confessionals and talk shows) to attribute victim status to everyone. Whilst there needs to be careful differentiation between the theoretical domain of trauma studies and the overarching culture of trauma, the two are integrally related. Indeed, Susannah Radstone argues that the rise of trauma studies in the academy was at least partially responsible for the growth of the phenomenon that Roger Luckhurst terms “traumaculture,” testifying to the “organizing power of trauma” in the 1990s.Footnote ⁴⁰ Radstone's comments identify the origins of the transference of traumatic narratives between the academy and popular culture that would be exacerbated after 9/11,Footnote ⁴¹ associating the growth of traumaculture with “the rise of victim politics, the recourse to personal narratives of traumatization and the personalization of politics, if not the rise of memory and trauma studies.”Footnote ⁴²

Lauren Berlant believes that, in America, this privileging of trauma has created a culture of collective victimhood in which to be traumatized is to be valued. She argues that “the public rhetoric of citizen trauma has become so pervasive and competitive in the United States that it obscures basic differences among modes of identity, hierarchy, and violence.”Footnote ⁴³ This homogenization of suffering has political (or, rather, depoliticizing) consequences. During the early 1990s, Berlant noted in America a “rerouting [of] the critical energies of the emerging political sphere into the sentimental spaces of an amorphous opinion culture, characterized by strong patriotic identification mixed with feelings of practical political powerlessness.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Berlant contends that as the public sphere became personalized with the testimonies of innumerable “traumatized” individuals, previously personal matters were mooted as the concern of the state, creating “a traumatized core national identity” that required political healing.Footnote ⁴⁵

This nationalization of trauma reached its zenith after 9/11, and the extension of trauma beyond the realm of those immediately impacted by the attacks can be widely seen in critical and psychoanalytic discourse. Marnie Brow and Roxanne Cohen Silver (the principal investigator of a three-year national study of psychological responses to the attacks) assert, for example, that on 9/11 Americans “experienced a tragedy unprecedented in its scope and impact on both individual lives and the national psyche,”Footnote ⁴⁶ whilst Ronnie Bulman and Ramila Usoof-Thowfeek, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, suggest, “Those at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, and those who lost loved ones that day, experienced the depths of individual trauma. Yet 9/11 was also experienced by the nation as a whole.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Similarly, Skitka et al., also academics working in the field of psychology, argue that the “attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon had both immediate and long-term effects on the American psyche.”Footnote ⁴⁸ This problematic notion of a collective “American psyche” extends conditions pertaining to an individual pathology to a national level. Given the homogenization implicit in such a formulation, I cannot help but subscribe to Susannah Radstone's assessment that such collectivization of trauma is misguided, and has the unfortunate effect of “hardening into literality what might better be regarded as a series of compelling metaphors – the ‘traumatization’ of a nation, for instance, or the ‘healing’ of a culture.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Theorists and practitioners espousing such “metaphors” tend to draw parallels between the loss of security felt by individuals in the aftermath of the attacks and the damage to citizens' perception of the United States' invulnerability, suggesting a direct correspondence between individual identity and national narratives.Footnote ⁵⁰ What such approaches fail to note, however, is the distinction between wholesale national traumatization and the geographic dispersal of traumatized individuals across the space of the nation; that is to say, the difference between universal and discrete manifestations of trauma. Furthermore, as LoCicero, Brown, and Sinclair have suggested in their review of “Fear across America in a Post-9/11 World,” there are “methodological weaknesses” in studies “of the psychological impact of the terrorist attacks of 9/11,” which include “the tendency of researchers to focus on PTSD” at the expense of other psychological reactions.Footnote ⁵¹ In light of the fact that “if diagnosable PTSD is the only yardstick with which one measures effects, the effects for most were not, overall, of long duration,”Footnote ⁵² LoCicero, Brown, and Sinclair argue that, “while understandable,” this focus on PTSD at the expense of other modes of psychical response “unnecessarily limited the types of psychological effects examined.”Footnote ⁵³ These findings suggest a significant oversimplification of the complex dynamics of collective and individual modes of response to the attacks.

Whilst the New York Times described 9/11 as a “trauma that rippled outward,” I contend that it was the not the trauma itself but the size of the community to whom the label was extended that was progressively expanded, in ways that suggest that greater acknowledgment is needed of the role that both psychoanalytic studies and critical theory play in the constitution of traumaculture.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although E. Ann Kaplan concedes that the “experience of 9/11 … demonstrates the difficulties of generalizing about trauma,”Footnote ⁵⁵ she, like other theorists, does not acknowledge the extent to which trauma itself has become generalized after 9/11. Kaplan differentiates between “classic trauma” (e.g. firsthand experience of the attacks) and “trauma to include suffering terror” (a kind of secondary or “post”-trauma involving vicarious experience of an event).Footnote ⁵⁶ Whilst the impulse to distinguish between different traumatic states seems an adept and ethical move, the distinction between pathologically traumatic and intensely disturbing experience needs greater development. As evidence that New Yorkers in their entirety were traumatized by 9/11, Kaplan offers the following justification: “Everyone was in shock: people did not laugh out loud in the streets or in [Union] Square; voices were muted. People's expressions were somber.”Footnote ⁵⁷ I would not query the accuracy of her description of the city's residents in the aftermath of the attacks; however, I wonder whether displaying “somber” expressions and not laughing out loud could – indeed, should – be said to be concomitant with traumatization.

A similar problem persists in the work of psychoanalytic practitioners charged with treating New Yorkers after the attacks. As occupational therapist Dan Lynch has written,

Like Kaplan, Lynch fails to properly differentiate between differing levels of exposure to loss, preferring instead to embrace the appealing vision of an America united through a “national sense of family and personal history.” This provides an idealistic reading of the traumatized condition, embracing the popular post-9/11 belief that that “trauma can create community.”Footnote ⁵⁹ However, as Kai Erikson comments, it is often the case that, conversely, “traumatic conditions … move to the center of one's being and, in doing so, give victims the feeling that they have been set apart and made special,” creating an “altered relationship to the rest of humankind, to history.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Not only does such a standpoint enhance the potential for introspective solipsism, it also introduces the possibility of a violent backlash against the “Other,” who does not understand “our” pain – as was seen in the attacks on mosques and Muslims following 9/11.Footnote ⁶¹

In romanticizing the communitarian dimensions of trauma, Lynch has subscribed to a tendency that marks a curious feature of many of the discourses that have surrounded 9/11: the desire to place the attacks within a redemptive framework. Whilst academic theorizations of trauma have been conventionally antiredemptive in thrust, diverse elements of America's post-9/11 culture have evidenced a fascination with the possibility of healing. This is particularly evident where psychoanalytic discourse moves out of medical or academic confines and into more accessible cultural forums.Footnote ⁶² As discussions of trauma have entered the public sphere they have been met with a desire for tales of redemption, presumably as a counterbalance to the nation's collective “wound.” As Trimarco and Depret have argued,

Describing his treatment of New Yorkers following the attacks, Lynch comments on the intense media interest that surrounded the recovery of traumatized patients:

Within psychoanalytic practice, the process of “healing” has tended to emphasize the procedural nature of mourning and the gradual working through of loss for individuals diagnosed as pathologically traumatized. However, much of the terminology in which such processes have been couched is uncomfortably reminiscent of the more triumphalist (often deeply nationalistic) rhetoric that characterized the representation of the attacks in the public–political sphere. Note, for instance, the title of Precin's collection, Healing 9/11,Footnote ⁶⁵ in which occupational therapists working with survivors of 9/11 and the families of victims document their time spent on “Project Liberty” – an endeavour which aimed to help firefighters cope with their experiences in the aftermath of the attacks.

A fascination with ideas of liberty and freedom extends across 9/11's memorial culture, and helps to place stories of personal loss into a wider discourse firmly rooted in a nationalist sphere, identifying manifestations of private grief with quintessential American values.Footnote ⁶⁶ This conflation of personal and public discourse offers the opportunity for the emergence of a politics of sentimentality as envisaged by Berlant. The strong focus on emotional and sentimental issues engendered by this “antipolitical politics”Footnote ⁶⁷ deflects attention from the “processes of articulation through which past happenings and their meanings are discursively produced, transmitted and mediated,” meaning that traumatic narratives often assume a transparency that belies their imbrication in hegemonic discourses,Footnote ⁶⁸ as can be seen in the state's appropriation of the psychoanalytic rhetoric found in discussions of collective traumatization across media coverage and in critical commentary. As Edkins argues, the events of 11 September

In an account in The Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal claims that the Bush administration was immediately aware of the potential political capital of the attacks. Blumenthal opens with the following statement: “‘Lucky me, I hit the trifecta,’ said George Bush in the immediate aftermath of September 11, according to his budget director. War, recession and national emergency liberated him to soar in the political stratosphere.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Difficult as they are to verify, one can only hope that the comments attributed to Bush have been exaggerated; nonetheless, Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, reinforces Blumenthal's assertion that the Bush administration manipulated the psychological impact of the attacks to facilitate its political and military agendas. Arguing that the discourse of trauma was utilized to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Clarke has labelled this strategy the “White House 9/11 trauma defense.”Footnote ⁷¹ Testifying to the validity of this claim, and contending that the need to protect America's traumatized citizens necessitated “special measures” such as so-called “extraordinary rendition” and the use of practices inseparable from torture, Condoleezza Rice asserts, “Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans.”Footnote ⁷² Such a defence, Clarke comments, suggests that representatives of the former Bush administration “want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic.”Footnote ⁷³

Whilst not explicitly participating in this politicization of trauma, the psychoanalytic community (including both mental-health practitioners and academic theorists) has been insufficiently self-reflexive about the potential appropriation of its terminology. Following 9/11, the American Psychological Association (APA) quickly released an online document entitled Coping with Terrorism.Footnote ⁷⁴ This guide rather vaguely asserted that “many people are impacted” as a result of a terrorist attack such as 9/11, and emphasized the transmittal of secondary trauma, including among those most affected, “People who experience traumatization from learning of relatives, friends and acquaintances who were subject to the violence, or from exposure to repeated media accounts of the trauma.”Footnote ⁷⁵ As the latter could be said to include the majority of the American – if not global – population, practitioners might here be seen to be providing a medical basis for the (self-)diagnosis of unlimited numbers of traumatized individuals. More questionably, however, the APA also posit the state as the institution responsible for helping citizens recover from the attacks, asserting that victims should take comfort from “the actions our government is taking to combat terrorism and restore safety and security.”Footnote ⁷⁶ This statement places the narrative of trauma firmly in a political framework, disavowing individuals' responsibility for their own psychical recovery by promoting an uncritical trust in the government, elevated here to the role of protector; a sentiment reinforced by the APA's assertion that those considering themselves traumatized should cede their problems to “trained officials throughout the country.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Such a strategy supports Edkins's assertion that “the status of victim of post-traumatic stress disorder serves to render the survivor more or less harmless to existing power structures. In contemporary culture victimhood offers sympathy and pity in return for the surrender of any political voice.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Rather than being alert to the potential enmeshment of their ideas with hegemonic interests, those working within trauma practice and theory have exhibited an introspection that has led to an overwhelming focus on the personal at the expense of the political. This approach has foregrounded the experiences of practitioners themselves, creating a problematic identification between author and subject that leaves little room for any distanced critical perspective to emerge. The opening lines of Coates, Schechter and Rosenthal's collection, Trauma and Human Bonds, for example, emphasize therapists' oneness with the traumatized community, stating, “On September 11, 2001, mental health professionals in and around New York City, no less than other residents, were profoundly traumatized and burdened with uncertainty and apprehension.”Footnote ⁷⁹

In the wake of 9/11, a genre that I describe as testimony-criticism appears to have emerged. By “testimony-criticism” I do not mean the analysis of testimony as elaborated in the seminal work of Felman and Laub,Footnote ⁸⁰ but a form of theory that draws upon the author's own experiences as its principle frame of reference. Kaplan provides a prime example of this in her reflection on 9/11, where she presents the consequences of the attacks in explicitly personal terms. The events of 11 September, she argues, “radically altered my relationship to New York, to the United States qua nation, and produced a new personal identity.”Footnote ⁸¹ For Kaplan, this “new personal identity” hinged upon a constellation of the trauma of 9/11 and her experiences as a child in England during the Second World War. Reflecting on her reactions, she asserts that “the traumatic event merged with the childhood events, so that history and memory, time and space collapsed into one present time of terror; 9/11 produced a new subjectivity.”Footnote ⁸² Whilst this statement seems representative of Kaplan's own response to 9/11, I wish to query how useful such a personalized analysis is for understanding the wider significance of the attacks.

Kaplan is far from the only theorist to have framed her analysis of 9/11 in predominantly personal terms: in their discussions of 9/11, Dori Laub, Marpianne Hirsch, Suheir Hammad, and Donna Bassin all similarly foreground their own experiences of 11 September.Footnote ⁸³ James Berger informs the reader that the attacks engendered flashbacks to “my two mentally retarded sisters and my failures to save them,”Footnote ⁸⁴ whilst Judith Greenberg, editor of the collection Trauma at Home after 9/11, explains at some length how she “spent the morning ‘safe’ at home six miles away on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.”Footnote ⁸⁵ I do not want to negate the importance of critics' need to bear witness to their experiences; however, one of the chief problems with this personalized discourse is that its prioritization of individual experience empties theoretical reflection of all contextualizing historicity, displacing the event itself as the focus of attention.

The relationship between a historical event and the subjective experience it engenders is complex. As Mark Seltzer argues, the inability to distinguish between the two is characteristic of the traumatized state, as trauma entails “a fundamental shattering or breaking-in of the boundaries between the external [event] and the internal [experience].”Footnote ⁸⁶ Seltzer insists, however, that trauma “is the product, not of the event itself but of how the subject repeats or represents it to himself.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Consequently, as we have seen in the context of 9/11, it is not the trauma that defines the subject, but the subject (individual, critical, political, or cultural) that defines the trauma. As Seltzer asserts, “The attribution of trauma … bends event-reference to self-reference, transferring interest from the event (real or posited) to the subject's self-representation.”Footnote ⁸⁸ With critical narratives placing the attacks firmly in a personal context, the distance needed to separate event from experience in the context of 9/11 has been elided. This confusion has subsequently infiltrated traumaculture, particularly as portrayed in (and constituted by) certain novels of the 9/11 canon.Footnote ⁸⁹

These novels reveal 9/11 as a transformatory moment with a dramatic effect on the biographies and personal histories of characters, even those who may have been only tangentially affected by the attacks. The date 11 September is recurrently portrayed not as an occurrence of historical magnitude, but as the catalyst for emotional private events, including marital reunions (DeLillo, Foer, Glass), adultery (Abbott, McInerney, Schulman), divorce (O'Neill), familial estrangements and homecomings (Allen, Kingsbury, Maynard), bullying (Friedman, Prose), and illness (Nissenson, Price).Footnote ⁹⁰ In short, the attacks form the background for a number of smaller, everyday, “traumas,” into which they are subsumed and by which they become defined.

In Abbott's The Future of Love, Edith Mendel sees 9/11 as the possibility to restart her marriage, forcing her adulterous husband, Sam, to return from his mistress (Antonia) in Manhattan. Following the attacks,

Just as Edith reads the events as an “omen” for her marriage, Gerhard Falktopf, the protagonist of Schulman's A Day at the Beach, interprets the attacks as an indictment of his wife, Suzannah. Irrationally, he queries, “Why didn't Suzannah in all her zeal guard against airplanes that behaved like heat-seeking missiles? The world was literally falling to pieces around him … Gerhard convinced himself that it had been her job to protect him from all this.”Footnote ⁹² Whilst Gerhard blames Suzannah for the chaos erupting before him, in the midst of the devastation his wife also reads the events as a message intended for her. Suzannah interprets the falling man she witnesses jumping from the towers as her personal herald, who warns her, “You must change your life. She heard the voice again. Is that what that man was to her, the diver, the falling body? Was he a messenger, a rescuer, a winged angel sent to save her?”Footnote ⁹³

In its most extreme manifestations, this internalization of events sees characters interpreting 9/11 as a consequence of their own actions. Karen Kingsbury's Luke Baxter fears that 9/11 might be a sign of God's displeasure at his sexual relations with his girlfriend, Reagan. Having ignored a call from Reagan's father (who worked at the World Trade Center) as they lost their virginities on 10 September 2001, Luke prays after hearing of the attacks, “Please God. Get Reagan's father out. She didn't get a chance to talk to him yesterday because … I'm sorry, God. It was my fault. Please don't punish her for my mistake.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Abbott's Antonia similarly wonders whether 9/11 can be attributed to her affair with a married man, commenting, “O God maybe it was her fault that terrorists had knocked down the World Trade Center. She was committing adultery, or at least Sam was. Or fornication. The Taliban didn't recognize the difference probably.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The distorted causalities imagined by these characters are clearly misguided; however, they reflect a wider tendency – refreshingly critiqued by the character of Joyce in Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country – to personalize the historical chronicle to which the attacks belong. As Joyce comments,

With the exception of Kalfus's text, the novels considered above seem too often to contribute to, rather than critique, this personalization of 9/11.Footnote ⁹⁷ For this corpus to focus so overwhelmingly on the personal suggests a limited degree of engagement with the wider significance of the events, preferring a retreat into a sentimentalized domestic arena where the attacks are contextualized not historically or politically, but by the intimate relationships of individuals, very few of whom have been directly affected by 9/11. However, this phenomenon is not confined to critical and literary spheres. A similarly introspective tendency can be observed in other commemorative projects relating to 9/11, most notably perhaps at the WTC Tribute Center at Ground Zero.

Established by the September 11th Families' Association, the Tribute Center is (until the completion of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum) the focal point of memorial culture at Ground Zero. The Center's philosophy is grounded on the transmittal of a “person to person history,” continuing the personalized discourse noted in both fiction and criticism. As described on the Center's website, the site aims to “provide an emotional connection to the events of 9/11”; “The stories told inside the Tribute Center are also based on personal experience … All of the information is transmitted in the first person voice, by those who experienced 9/11.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The Center's approach is thus highly emotive and relies upon affectivity to achieve its pedagogical aims. Its goal is not to provide historical explanation, but to offer visitors “guidance, friendship, and the opportunity to carry with them a significant memory for the rest of their lives.”Footnote ⁹⁹

The main exhibit constructs a narrative from various artefacts rescued from the rubble at Ground Zero, accounts from survivors or victims' family members, and the comments of selected visitors who have come to the exhibition. The focus here is almost exclusively testimonial; there is little contextualizing exposition in evidence, with the “timeline” of 9/11 and scant historical detail depicted on vertical columns located in such proximity to each other that they are difficult to read in the cramped exhibition space. Instead, artefacts are expected to tell their own story, displaying a misplaced faith in the transparency of such objects, and their ability to “speak” to a visitor. A partially melted cell phone, for example, creates the impression of ruination, but the actual subject of the loss encountered is difficult to locate (especially without knowing to whom the phone belonged, and having no hint as to the fate of this person).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The exhibits thus generate a rather generalized sense of destruction and mourning, attached variously to the museum, Ground Zero, the surrounding city, and the nation as a whole. This lack of specificity reinforces the impression that, as Joan W. Scott argues, the “appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation … weakens the critical thrust of histories.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

By suggesting that experience is “a kind of subjective testimony, one that is immediate, true and authentic,” the Tribute Center has replicated in the cultural sphere the same unreflexive overpersonalization of history and memory that Radstone identifies as stultifying critique within the academy.Footnote ¹⁰² Whilst testimonial accounts can – and often do – play a valuable role in commemorative practice, I am uncomfortable with their use as the dominant pedagogical medium at the site. Furthermore, I find the assumption that the experience of loss can be transmitted so easily from “person to person” deeply problematic. This transference of loss is replicated in the Walking Tour of Ground Zero offered by the Center, upon which “more than 150 volunteers, all from the 9/11 community, guide visitors around the site, each sharing his or her own unique experience.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The moving autobiographical stories told by the tour guides are intended to give visitors “an unparalleled opportunity to connect with history first-hand,” an approach compounded by the guides' insistence that their personal losses on 9/11 were the losses of “us all”; that the trauma of the attacks was shared equally by everyone, everywhere.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

This notion of viral history returns us to the province of trauma, recalling Caruth's contentious theorization of trauma as a form of contagion that can be transmitted through texts and (thwarted) acts of witnessing. Arguing that trauma speaks of a history that is accessible only in its incomprehensibility, Caruth's reading suggests that the attempt to gain knowledge about the past through testimonies such as those offered by the guides of the Tribute Center's walking tour threatens “the traumatization of the ones who listen.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In this analysis, trauma must be seen as a condition “with no cure,”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ transmitted virally between people in failed acts of communication that attempt to bear witness to the troubling past. For subscribers to this perspective, “Trauma's contagion, which spreads via the language community, has the potential to victimize all who are affected by the language of trauma.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

There is, I would argue, a concerning lack of self-reflexivity about the implications of this unlimited extension of traumatized identity. Caruth comments that “The phenomenon of trauma has seemed to become all-inclusive, but it has done so because it brings us to the limits of our understanding.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In placing trauma beyond comprehension, the discourses under consideration here leave themselves open to total disconnection from historical context. Taking us to the “limits of our understanding” but failing to look beyond them opens a path that seems only to lead to mystification, offering no way to better understanding either the past or the present, revealing an “impossible history,” defined by events that we “cannot entirely possess.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Seeking to understand traumatic events, by this argument, can teach us only about trauma – ensuring that all attempts at interpretation are cloaked in its mystifying veil.

Such a trend has determined many responses to 9/11, as diverse forms of representation are assumed to testify to their own traumatization. In her analysis of media coverage, for example, Jenny Edkins revives the well-worn assumption that the recurrent replaying of the planes hitting the towers of the World Trade Center was a symptom of traumatization. She comments,

These same models have been utilized to characterize the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, which Bassin describes as a space that is at once traumatized and traumatizing.Footnote ¹¹¹ For Kaplan the troubled reconstruction process has also proven symptomatic of trauma. She argues, “Traumatic residues of ‘acting out’ may be seen in the tensions, conflicts, and intense debates about the site that moved to the fore as the city began to think about rebuilding.”Footnote ¹¹² However, this analysis obscures the very real political and economic interests that have been contending over the ownership of Ground Zero.

Interpreting the diverse elements of 9/11's memorial culture under the homogenizing lens of trauma serves to veil the many interests at stake in the representation and remembrance of the attacks. I suspect that the ubiquity of these narratives is tied to the prevalence of traumatic tropes in American culture prior to 9/11, meaning preexisting paradigms were imposed upon the attacks as the optimum method of interpretation without adequate time for reflection.Footnote ¹¹³ Whilst there is no denying that those most affected by the attacks were undoubtedly traumatized by their impact, I cannot help but believe that some of the theorists cited may have found trauma everywhere they looked, because they simply looked for it everywhere.Footnote ¹¹⁴ There is a very real irony to this imposition of trauma as the master narrative of the attacks. Dori Laub laments that, owing to its traumatic impact, “there is no coherent narrative about September 11.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Laub ignores, however, the fact that there is a coherent narrative about 11 September, and it is one that he himself is helping to create. Initially perceived as “a fundamental disruption in our received modes of understanding,” in the context of 9/11 trauma threatens to become the received mode of understanding itself – with all the worrying implications traditionally associated with master narratives normalized by and appropriated for the public–political sphere.Footnote ¹¹⁶

This ongoing failure to separate critical responses to the attacks from the mode of their appropriation has been exacerbated by the intensifying personalization of the American public sphere. Both issues require the urgent attention of those working within American studies if a convincing, antihegemonic counternarrative is to be created for 9/11 and its aftermath.