INTRODUCTION: AMY WALDMAN'S THE SUBMISSION AS 9/11 COUNTER-MEMORIAL

As a former New York Times reporter and contributor to the newspaper's Pulitzer Prize-winning “Portraits of Grief ,”Footnote ¹ Amy Waldman understood the political importance of post-9/11 memorialization as she wrote The Submission (2011), a novel that imagines what might have happened if an Arab American architect had won the 9/11 memorial design competition. Waldman knew she was “on to something,”Footnote ² and that her novel would “hit a nerve” for the American public, when an early draft of The Submission proved “unusually – frighteningly – prescient” about the racially charged “uproar” surrounding the “so-called Ground Zero mosque,” the proposed Park51 Islamic community center, in 2010.Footnote ³ In Memorial Mania, Erika Doss describes how such political emotion shapes memorials or monuments, which she defines interchangeably as “archives of public affect” engaged in reifying and “privileging particular histories and values.”Footnote ⁴ Days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the New York Times created just such an archive of affect with the “Portraits of Grief ,” which the editors called a “national shrine” to the attack victims.Footnote ⁵ Waldman felt ambivalent about her own contributions to the “Portraits” because their limited word count “left no room for complexity,”Footnote ⁶ and she therefore sought in The Submission not to construct a shrine but to deconstruct the idea of memorialization itself, to write what she has called an “anti-memorial”Footnote ⁷ or “counter-memorial” novel.Footnote ⁸ According to Rebecca Walkowitz, The Submission “turns monuments into narratives” by representing memorial space through its own literary form, because “monuments fix, narratives unfold.”Footnote ⁹ Rather than fixing a physical, emotional, historical, or ethical “frame around that day,” as Doss suggests memorials do, Waldman aims in The Submission to “break that frame,” to “link what happened to what came after” and thus to write a counter-memorial novel about memorialization.Footnote ¹⁰

This counter-memorial approach is also central to two very different 9/11 memorials in New York: Michael Arad and Peter Walker's Reflecting Absence on the site of the World Trade Center and Columbia University's 9/11 Oral History Project. Like Waldman's The Submission, both Arad and Walker's physical memorial and Columbia's oral history archive seek to break existing frames around September 11, 2001, not simply by opposing memorialization, as an anti-memorial would, but by creating public space for disagreement and debate.Footnote ¹¹ 9/11 memorial jury member James E. Young coined the term “counter-monument” in 1999 to describe post-World War II Germany's creation of “painfully self-conscious memorial spaces” that question the commemoration of the Holocaust.Footnote ¹² Building on this idea, Erika Doss argues that the counter-monument's reflective approach “ideally encourages public agency” by constructing space for political disagreement.Footnote ¹³ Young and the other jury members sought a 9/11 memorial design for such a public forum, arguing that in our “increasingly democratic age,” the “stories of nations” must be told not in the centralized messaging of “self-certain national shrines,”Footnote ¹⁴ but “in the multiple voices of its everyday historians – i.e. its individual citizens.”Footnote ¹⁵ They selected Arad and Walker's Reflecting Absence as an exemplary counter-monument that, like The Submission, explicitly and self-consciously aimed to “break the rules” of public memorialization.Footnote ¹⁶ Similarly, Mary Marshall Clark, director of Columbia's Center for Oral History, says that she approached the 9/11 Oral History Project “like Herodotus,” placing more emphasis on the “stories of those who lived through the events” of September 11, 2001, than on the “media hysteria” that “aided the state in rationalizing a wholesale war on terror” with its more unified story of national trauma.Footnote ¹⁷ This essay juxtaposes Arad and Walker's memorial and Columbia's 9/11 Oral History Project with Waldman's novel and journalism, exploring how counter-memorials break existing frames around “9/11” in order to create physical, temporal, and literary space for collective debate about the meaning and impact of the attacks.

In addition to breaking conceptual frames around September 11, 2001, itself, Waldman's translation of memorial space into literary form also deconstructs critical conceptions of post-9/11 fiction as a genre. Most existing scholarship has sought to define that literature by identifying its appropriate subject matter, debating whether a global or local focus is more appropriate to American fiction after the attacks. On the one hand, Richard Gray, Michael Rosenberg, and Martin Randall have labeled domestic fiction like Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children (2006), Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), and Don Delillo's Falling Man (2007) as a “failure”Footnote ¹⁸ because its focus on “merely local concerns”Footnote ¹⁹ precludes the essential act of “imagining the transnational,” an imaginative act more obviously central to Lorraine Adams's Harbor (2004), John Updike's Terrorist (2006), or Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007).Footnote ²⁰ On the other hand, John Duvall, Robert Marzac, and Catherine Morley have contested the notion that post-9/11 “fiction is no more than a political tool,”Footnote ²¹ citing canonical precedents like Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as evidence of value in a domestic and thus more “oblique treatment of the root cause of a historical trauma.”Footnote ²² More recently, Sonia Baelo-Allué and Mathew Leggatt have examined how Waldman's The Submission fits into this debate. Baelo-Allué praises The Submission for moving beyond the individual “numbness of psychological trauma” to the “polyphony of cultural trauma,”Footnote ²³ which she sees the novel resolving with a “set of symbols that codify” and give meaning to cultural trauma. Leggatt more skeptically interrogates such national meaning-making, arguing that by trying to “strike a balance” in public sympathy between victims of personal loss and social prejudice, The Submission allows the very “retreat into the binary language of good versus evil” that it aims to resist.Footnote ²⁴ For Leggatt, The Submission exemplifies an irony central to post-9/11 fiction: the more forcefully this literature critiques the myth that “everything changed” on this date, the more inescapably it works to “reinforce that myth through the memorialization” and codification of the attacks.Footnote ²⁵ This essay adds to the critical conversation by analyzing the essential, productive memorial function of literary form. Waldman's The Submission does more than just memorialize the attacks thematically: the novel foregrounds and deconstructs its own formal choices and thus offers a case study in how to build counter-memorial literary space. The novel's structure, figurative language, and narrative point of view, in particular, illustrate the productive breakdown of narrative authority and thus raise important questions about any political or critical framework that too quickly or rigidly defines post-9/11 American national identity and literature.

The Submission’s formal, systematic deconstruction of both narrative and political authority has ensured its continued relevance today, as American citizens struggle to make sense, rather than confusion, of what many have called our “‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’ world.”Footnote ²⁶ Soon after the attacks, Wolfgang Schivelbusch warned against a dangerous post-9/11 “vacuum” in the American psyche, “crying to be filled with an act of military revenge” for which there was no single clear target.Footnote ²⁷ Richard Bernstein has articulated how “post-9/11 ‘evil talk’” quickly filled this vacuum with an illusion of clarity for an “uncritical or unreflective” public craving “objective certainty, absolutes, and rigid dualisms” after the attacks.Footnote ²⁸ In a recent Granta essay, Peter Pomerantsev has extended this argument to the present day, exploring the political dangers of an unreflective public willing to accept not objective certainty but subjective relativism without question. Rather than relying on the dualism of good versus evil to justify a global “war on terror” against the “Axis of Evil,”Footnote ²⁹ as President George W. Bush did after the attacks, contemporary leaders like Michael Gove in Great Britain's Brexit campaign, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Donald Trump in the United States have all turned the relativistic idea “that every version of events is just another narrative” to political advantage. Pomerantsev draws here upon the philosophy of Maurizio Ferraris, who sees contemporary politics as the “culmination” of more than two centuries of philosophical thought. When disagreement begins to excuse, rather than interrogate, an incoherent public discourse, “fake news” becomes a label for any perspective other than one's own. Political leaders and citizens alike can thus rationalize their own civic irresponsibility by contending that “if everyone is lying, then anything goes, whether it's in your personal life or in invading foreign countries.” Pomerantsev suggests that such self-indulgence is easier – and thus more appealing – than coherence, and he blames both politicians who validate the “joy of pure emotion, often anger, without any sense,” and a public eager to “indulge in a full, anarchic liberation from coherence.” Whether such political rhetoric exaggerates or obliterates absolute distinctions between different perspectives, the result is a public that cedes intellectual responsibility for its nation's political policy.

The physical and literary counter-memorial spaces discussed in this essay invite a more empathetic and democratic attention to disagreement than the angry and anarchic approach that Pomerantsev describes. Daniel O'Gorman summarizes scholarly debate about the relationship between empathy and democracy after the attacks: on the one hand, Judith Butler has argued that mourning the victims might help the Unites States to “rearticulate the possibility of democratic political culture” both domestically and globally;Footnote ³⁰ on the other, Martin Hoffman has warned against an “empathetic over-arousal” that potentially leads to what O'Gorman labels a “narcissistic and inadvertently imperialistic” national response.Footnote ³¹ O'Gorman navigates this debate with Hannah Arendt's idea of a “dialogue between me and myself,” which productively binds empathy to the process of “thinking itself.”Footnote ³² Michael Morrell's Empathy and Democracy argues for the central role of empathetic thought in democratic politics, since “without empathy, large modern societies cannot give citizens the kind of equal consideration necessary to make democratic decisions legitimate.”Footnote ³³ Morrell traces the philosophical history of empathy, expanding its definition, as O'Gorman does, beyond feeling to a complex “process” in which the emotional states of others enter a “feedback loop” linking one's own emotional and cognitive responses to other points of view.Footnote ³⁴ “Democracy,” Morell concludes, “needs the process of empathy” to replace purely emotional responses with more “inclusive, attentive deliberation.”Footnote ³⁵ Building on O'Gorman's and Morrell's arguments, this essay explores how physical and literary counter-memorials allow for such deliberative democracy. If memorials are typically designed to reify a particular, often emotional, view of national experience and values, counter-memorials intentionally foster uncomfortable conversations about national identity within larger global and historical contexts. Such conversations, across political lines, are both difficult and essential in the United States today.

FRAMING AND UNFRAMING “9/11”: “PORTRAITS OF GRIEF” AND THE SUBMISSION

The term “9/11” itself illustrates the temptation to frame the attacks in purely emotional terms, as a defining American experience rather than as a part of global political history. In The Rhetoric of Terror, Marc Redfield notes the omission of the year in the “bare name-date” of “9/11,” arguing that because this name-date “presupposes and demands knowledge … the year understood, the attacks understood,” the label “9/11” assumes that “a new history begins” at what he calls a “calendrical ground zero,” where “previous September 11s disappear.”Footnote ³⁶ Amy Waldman says that she avoided the term “9/11” in The Submission because

Short-circuiting the thoughtful work of building political context, Redfield argues, this broadly sketched national shorthand monumentalizes a single emotional political moment and thus leads to the dangerous assumption of American exceptionalism. “Before or after September 11, 2001, very few U.S. citizens could have been counted on to know, for example (and it is an exemplary example) what September 11 means in Chilean history,” Redfield points out, concluding that the “naked phrase ‘September 11’ rhetorically reperforms that ignorance, and the global hegemony of American media and culture imposes the sign of that erasure worldwide.”Footnote ³⁸ Like Redfield, Waldman critiques both the performance of ignorance and the imposition of one worldview upon others. The Submission interrogates the political “compromises we've made” in response to the attacks by making readers self-conscious about the idea of “9/11” itself: “You can't tell people how to think” about the attacks, Waldman observes, “but art can make them think about how they think.”Footnote ³⁹

Such self-conscious deliberation takes time and distance that were as yet unavailable when the New York Times started publishing its “Portraits of Grief” just days after the attacks. Waldman herself worked intensively on “the aftermath and the grief and all of that” for six weeks as part of the “Portraits” team,Footnote ⁴⁰ producing a commemorative album of the “Snapshots of Their Lives,” as they were originally called, that left her so ambivalent.Footnote ⁴¹ Ranging from “Lizzie Martínez-Calderón: A Mother's Love” to “Charles Henry Karczewski: Loved Wine, Hated Silence”; from “Kevin M. Cosgrove: ‘A Good Snuggler’” to “Maxima Jean-Pierre: No Doubt Who Was Boss,”Footnote ⁴² these brief two-hundred-word tributes were “uniform”Footnote ⁴³ and “formulaic,”Footnote ⁴⁴ dependably establishing victims’ hobbies (Judith Hofmiller's “passion was cross-stitching,” while James Audiffred “was nutty over lighthouses”) and family relationships (Mary Melendez “doted on her husband and four children,” just as Paul Ortiz Jr. “doted on his wife” and was “immensely proud of their baby”).Footnote ⁴⁵ Erika Doss describes the temporary memorials around the destroyed Twin Towers in much the same way: they vividly and emotionally “remember the recently, suddenly dead” by making “loss visible and public.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Even though Times journalists recognized that the power of the portraits, like that of temporary memorials, was “at least as much emotional as intellectual,”Footnote ⁴⁷ they were surprised by the allocation of substantial resources to a project designed to “chronicle how people were feeling” after the attacks.Footnote ⁴⁸ Far more than just chronicling public emotion, however, “Portraits” ground the experience of national loss in the details of personal acquaintance, building a more permanent than temporary print monument to a deceptively unified idea of national trauma. As Doss argues, the portraits document and soothe, rather than investigate and probe, “the potentially disordering grief of 9/11” by framing personal loss as “a tragic national ordeal that was experienced and endured by all Americans.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Cultural critics have evaluated the political consequences of this editorial decision to construct the “Portraits of Grief” as a national shrine to public grief. Doss quite forcefully argues that although the portraits share a superficially “intimate and anecdotal” tone with missing-person flyers and temporary memorials, they have actually “sidestepped” the media's crucial responsibility to ask “critically engaged questions of why and how 9/11 happened,” questions that should define both memorialization and rigorous political journalism.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nancy K. Miller similarly acknowledges the potential of “Portraits” to place even the most humble “private person into the public arena,” but she is troubled by the assumption of newsreaders and writers that these “anecdotes and details” have somehow “delivered the truth of the beloved victim.”Footnote ⁵¹ Quoting a 2002 New Yorker piece, Miller argues that, as a group, “Portraits” works not by seeking facts about the individual victim for the bereaved but by “reducing to human scale … the immeasurable dimensions of September 11” for the nation.Footnote ⁵² David Simpson shares Miller's concern about reducing the scale of the terrorist attacks for political purposes, but he more directly critiques a corresponding emotional inflation of our national narrative, labeling the “defiantly positive” rhetoric of the “Portraits” as “verbal flag-waving” that “oddly flattened out” the nuances of individual identity in building the Times’s journalistic “national shrine.”Footnote ⁵³ Despite minor differences in approach, these scholars all critique the New York Times’s choice in the “Portraits of Grief” to build a shrine to national trauma rather than to investigate the facts driving the United States's global response to the attacks.

Although Waldman's own experience covering the attacks and their aftermath left her ambivalent about a journalistic framing of “9/11” that may well have helped justify the political “war on terror,” reviews have criticized The Submission for accepting without question the emotional approach of “Portraits of Grief” to the terrorist attacks. The novel's characters, these reviewers argue, “align with various clichés familiar to the loyal reader of the Times,”Footnote ⁵⁴ and its plot is “so familiar, so pre-scripted, it could be predicted by anyone who reads the paper.”Footnote ⁵⁵ While Waldman's early work on the portraits did familiarize her with the emotional arguments driving both the memorial debate and post-9/11 US policy, her point of view shifted radically with her reassignment to document the global political response “in places like Afghanistan, where your perspective broadens out to include [everything] from how we as a country were reacting to it to the cost of the war we were waging.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Her investigative reporting following the 2003 Iraq invasion included pieces like “Hussein's Image Is Banned in Public, Except on Money,”Footnote ⁵⁷ “Bremer Says More Attacks Won't Deter Allies,”Footnote ⁵⁸ and “The Murder of Baathists,”Footnote ⁵⁹ all of which challenge assumptions about Iraqi leaders and their weapons of mass destruction or collaboration with al Qaeda. By 2004, this self-critical approach to public discourse and policy was becoming increasingly institutionalized in the United States. The National Security Archive, for example, documented “the continued failure of Coalition forces to locate a single biological, chemical or nuclear weapon” in Iraq;Footnote ⁶⁰ the New York Times publicly apologized for being “too intent on rushing scoops into the paper” and thus settling for coverage that “was not as rigorous as it should have been” before the Iraq war;Footnote ⁶¹ and the United States government itself formed an independent 9/11 Commission, whose bestselling 9/11 Report argued that “the most important failure” of national leaders “was one of imagination” in interpreting the “facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks.”Footnote ⁶² Although The Submission is similarly self-critical, reviewers and critics have accused Waldman of unimaginatively repackaging an international “call to arms” by framing “tragedy as a global disaster.”Footnote ⁶³ However, like any good counter-memorial, this novel frames only to deconstruct the personal stereotypes and public scripts that sought to fix and monumentalize ideas of American exceptionalism in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

THE CASE FOR SPACE: REFLECTING ABSENCE AND THE SUBMISSION

Noting parallels between Michael Arad and Peter Walker's Reflecting Absence memorial and Amy Waldman's novel, actual memorial jury member James E. Young has called The Submission a “masterpiece” because “this novel is, like memory itself, never just one thing.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Young and the other jury members sought just such a winning entry in the memorial design competition: they wanted their chosen design to create a physical and ideological site of “contested and competing meanings.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Arguing that the memorial should be “animated (not disabled) by the forces of history bringing it into being,”Footnote ⁶⁶ the committee selected Arad and Walker's Reflecting Absence because they saw it as a “counter-monument” capable of navigating the fraught territory between private grief and public commemoration, personal trauma and political retribution.Footnote ⁶⁷ In a 2011 interview soon after the memorial's opening, Arad affirmed that he and Walker had envisioned both a contemplative space where individuals could “express what was important to them” personally and a public place offering “meaning to all of us, not just Americans but to everyone in the world.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Their memorial thus invites visitors “to go sort of within, to be reflective and to do that not alone but as a community with others”Footnote ⁶⁹ in “a public democratic space.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Anne Hilker connects this reflective approach to the experience of melancholy itself, which she defines as a state of “confounding contradictions” between mourning loss and enjoying a “positive experience of remembrance.”Footnote ⁷¹ Hilker places Arad and Walker's Reflecting Absence among other “civic sites of moral and historical questioning” that foreground the “contradictions of melancholy” by publicly framing hard questions: “How did this happen? Why did so many die? Will it happen again? Is either hatred or forgiveness truly useful? How can I live with this?”Footnote ⁷² The Reflecting Absence memorial creates space and opportunity to consider these questions, both individually and communally, and thus represents the possibility of a more patiently reflective than immediately emotional post-9/11 public discourse about the attacks.

The adjacent 9/11 Museum seems less concerned with posing questions than with documenting through extensive “multimedia displays, archives, narratives, and a collection of monumental and authentic artifacts” the lasting national impact of the attacks.Footnote ⁷³ Reporting on the recently opened museum, the New York Times articulates this difference in the work of memorials and museums, suggesting that the huge crossbeam marking the site of a daily Mass during the post-9/11 cleanup would have worked as a “sacred relic” in a memorial, but “this same hunk of iron is simply evidence” of the disaster in the Foundation Hall of the 9/11 Museum.Footnote ⁷⁴ Critics of the museum blame a “neurotic preservationist impulse” for leading curators to “conserve just about anything” related to the attacks,Footnote ⁷⁵ and to present this material in a “mishmash” of designs and “hodgepodge” of exhibits that illustrate and amplify a national sense of loss.Footnote ⁷⁶ Like the “Portraits of Grief,” the 9/11 Museum acts as a national shrine or “engine of catharsis”Footnote ⁷⁷ that builds its “emotional journey”Footnote ⁷⁸ around evidence of shared trauma. The museum's exhaustive historical record, documented in “many chapters of a long story, with many narrators and varieties of tone,”Footnote ⁷⁹ frames two very emotional exhibits at its core: a tomb-like vault of about 14,000 attack victims’ unclaimed remains and a church-like sanctuary where families name their loved ones in a repeating recording. In contrast to the counter-memorial approach of Reflecting Absence, the 9/11 Museum tries not so much to raise as to answer questions by gathering evidence of shared national grief after the attacks.

Adopting instead the counter-memorial approach of Reflecting Absence, The Submission creates formal literary space to question and reflect upon post-9/11 American public discourse by framing – and then breaking the frame around – the clichés that reviewers accuse Waldman of embracing. The novel's opening chapter recalls in order to critique the limited framework of the “Portraits of Grief”: the novel opens with a closed-room memorial debate that deliberately allows the fictional jury members to join opposing camps and deliver stereotypical lines in a public script of American exceptionalism “as if on cue.”Footnote ⁸⁰ On the one hand, as a fictional snapshot of Paula Grant-Berry, the actual jury's “lone family member,”Footnote ⁸¹ The Submission’s “star widow” (11), Claire Burwell, argues that “the families of the dead” should be able to “lay their hands on” the names at the memorial and thus “alter the scale” of the attacks (4–5). On the other, as a snapshot of Chinese American architect and actual jurist Maya Lin,Footnote ⁸² the fictional “jury's professional ‘memorialist’” (3), Ariana Montagu, contends that the names should act not as a “source of emotion” (3) but as a “historic signifier” and documentation of national loss (6). As the novel's counterpart to actual jury chair Vartan Gregorian, Paul Rubin describes Claire and Ariana, widow and artist, as “opposing sureties clashing like electric fields, the room crackling with their animus” (6), a metaphor that suggests the explosive danger of a committee room too narrowly focussed on its own concerns.

The novel immediately challenges this narrow focus by showing how its most obviously opposed characters defy the stereotypes they seem to represent. Claire is not simply a grieving widow but also an art-collecting, Yale-educated lawyer who recognizes that “there was more than beauty” for the bereaved in the Garden design she promotes (4). Ariana is similarly concerned with how the Void design she favors opens a “visceral, angry, dark, raw” physical and emotional wound represented by a “towering black granite rectangle, some twelve stories high” (6, 5). Simultaneously orienting and disorienting, this monumental structure ensures for Ariana that “anyone who visits – no matter how attenuated their link in time or geography to the attack – understands how it felt and what it meant” to live through the loss of family and friends (6). Ariana thus grounds the aesthetics of the Void as “national symbol” in the ongoing disorientation of individualized pain, making personally meaningful her role as public artist, as Claire makes publicly meaningful her private grief (6). By embracing at least some part of their opposition's perspective, each character complicates the stereotype she seems to represent and thus expands the scope of the national narrative the memorial helps to construct.

The Reflecting Absence memorial aims in a similar way to create productive conversation between disparate points of view. Arad has reiterated that “there is no single correct … way of experiencing the memorial” at Ground Zero because the impact of each visit is “very much determined by the people that come to the site.”Footnote ⁸³ The memorial committee's jury statement praised the design's ability simultaneously to allow an abstract sense of “absence to speak for itself” in Arad's cavernous World Trade Center footprints and to invite people to wander through Walker's “beautiful groves of trees,” which “like memory itself, demand the care and nurturing of those who visit and tend them.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In practice, Reflecting Absence encourages visitors to move freely between individualized and collective experiences of its constructed space: they can both “lay their hands” personally, as Claire might hope, on the engraved names of the victims and the individual trees (5) and marvel publicly, as Ariana would wish, at a sublime public loss represented by the massive waterfalls in the footprints of the Twin Towers. Waldman's closed-room committee showdown between the Garden and the Void initially pits these two aspects of Arad and Walker's design against one another, much as the scene seems to pit families against artists. Waldman was well aware, however, that the real memorial unites these two parts in one whole: the “trees … studded in orchard-like rows” of the Garden meet the “huge oval pool” of the Void in Reflecting Absence (4, 5). Just as the novel avoids the term “9/11,” it refuses to settle on any single national monument or shrine, replacing the snapshot approach of the “Portraits of Grief” or the “emotional underworld” of the 9/11 Museum with the narrative unfolding of an ongoing discussion at a counter-memorial.Footnote ⁸⁵

THE SUBMISSION AS CASE STUDY: LITERARY FORM AS MEMORIAL SPACE

Taking as its subject the importance and difficulty of building such a reflective memorial, The Submission shapes its own literary space to make readers think about how they think about memorial space. The Submission’s four-part structure frames the novel itself in much the same way as a “rigorous geometry” frames the eponymous winning submission in the novel's fictional memorial design competition. The Garden design is neatly divided into four quadrants with two crossing canals; within each quadrant, pathways further “imposed a grid on the trees,” and a perimeter wall, eighteen feet high, enclosed the entire space” (4). In keeping with this geometric design, The Submission appears to impose a grid upon and to build a wall around its own content. The novel introduces each of its four main sections with a drawing of a tree or trees in the appropriate quadrant(s): section one begins with one cypress in quadrant one; two with two trees in quadrants one and two, and so on. The truth, however, is that the garden's imposition of order – on personal trauma, public space, and the novel itself – is ultimately more imaginary than real. As its designer Mohammad Khan (or Mo, as he prefers to be called) bitterly observes at the novel's conclusion, the garden memorial was actually “never created” (322), and thus his design yields little more than a spectacle of public discord about itself. Both structurally and thematically, The Submission suggests that this public spectacle is a political construction: rather than build space for public debate, those in power often reinforce ideological walls between individuals and then attempt to resolve conflict with political policies shaped in their own image and to their own ends. The fact that The Submission’s four-part structure initially appears so rigid and real is thus precisely its point. By modeling its own structure on the imagined design of an unbuilt garden, The Submission draws attention to the often hidden structural power that frames not just memorials, but also the public policies that impact the lives of every individual living in the United States.

The novel explores the very real impact of this structural power by asking, as Alexandra Lange puts it, “What if Michael Arad had been Muslim?”Footnote ⁸⁶ When The Submission’s fictional jury votes to build the Garden, committee members panic at the news that its architect is Muslim American, imagining a public response polarized along the battle lines of the “war on terror”: the families of the dead, they fear, will “feel very offended” by the committee's choice (18), while the terrorists will “feel like they've won” (19). Like the TSA officers who profile Mo after the attacks and pull him from airport security for “questioning in a windowless room” (26), the jury now examines his architectural plans in their closed committee room “with suspicion, as if he were planning to bomb a building” (27). Such public scrutiny actually alters Khan's personal identity, making him feel increasingly “gingerly, polite, careful to give no cause for alarm or criticism” and causing him to develop a “more cautious avatar” that “he couldn't quite shake,” even in private (27). The more desperately he tries “to avoid being seen as a criminal,” the more likely he is to “act like one, feel like one” (30). When the press leaks news of the jury's decision with the uncorroborated headline “MYSTERY MUSLIM MEMORIAL MESS” and a “photo of an unidentified man in a balaclava, scary as a terrorist,” Mo recognizes only that he “couldn't find himself in that picture, which was the point” (57–58). Rather than seeking the truth about Khan, the novel's newspaper fuels an emotional public discourse in which “facts were not found but made” by “strangers” who “analyzed, judged, invented him” (140). Much like the New York Times editors who admitted to rushing stories into print both before and during the Iraq invasion in 2003, the media in The Submission hastily and dangerously shape national ideas about the “war on terror” by shutting down meaningful public discussion before it even begins.

The Submission’s metaphorical title explores what Waldman sees as the necessary, ongoing process of framing and unframing the political meaning of the attacks. As she says in one interview, the word “submission” is an intentional “pun on Mohammad [Khan]’s architectural submission and on the etymology of the word Islam, which means ‘voluntary submission to God.’”Footnote ⁸⁷ Waldman acknowledges that “it was that double meaning that originally made me choose the title,” but that meaning quickly proliferates, revealing “many more submissions – potential, resisted, actual.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The metaphor of the novel's title, like all figurative language, is built on a central contradiction: even as metaphors attempt to control and ground meaning, they create comparative distance that makes plain the constructed nature of such control. The Submission explores this idea by focussing its title metaphor on the tension between constructing and deconstructing meaning. Waldman has described how the novel's characters are all “under pressure of one sort or another – from family; from the public; from other characters; from politicians; from more abstract notions like grief or tolerance, to give way.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The title suggests that giving way means more than simply abandoning one's own views; submission requires placing one's own perspective within larger social and political contexts and conversations – and thus breaking the frames around limited conceptions of what the attacks could conceivably mean.

By formally juxtaposing the acts of defining and succumbing to new ideas, the novel's repeated and persistent use of metaphor, like its title, foregrounds the larger question of how nations and citizens construct meaning, particularly after a traumatic event like the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As in The Submission’s title, each metaphor initially seems to fix meaning concretely, only to suggest that such meaning necessarily shifts and proliferates as soon as one believes it to be fixed. The physical image of a youthful Claire “papier-mâchéing her own unfinished self,” for example, appears to define materially the abstract construction of her public persona, but the “unfinished” state of her identity exposes the increasingly unstable gap between persona and person, suggesting that identity is more dialogic and diachronic than determined (37). The same is true for history: thinking about the newspaper photo that frames Khan as a potential terrorist, Claire realizes that “before it hardened and came to seem as if it had never been otherwise, history was liquid, unfixed” (128). Once again, the metaphor seems to ground the idea of history materially, even as its play between history's liquid and solid forms amplifies the tension between facts and the narratives constructed from them. The novel represents even grief itself as a physical “country” where “joining the diaspora bore the taint of treason” (157), an image that places emotion geographically, even as it indicates the potential danger of equating grief with nationalism. The Submission’s figurative language thus systematically engages readers with characters in framing ideas about the attacks, but the images’ continuing failure definitively to do so suggests the value of breaking and reconsidering the frames that are so tempting to construct, particularly in the political rush to action following the experience of national trauma. The novel's repeated acts of framing and unframing ideas formally through figurative language suggest that no single frame actually works: these metaphors do not resolve but reveal the problem of constructing lasting commemorative meaning.

The Submission explores the impact of such limiting frameworks on characters trapped within an inadequate public discourse. As the angry right-wing brother of a dead firefighter, Sean Gallagher, for example, replaces Ariana Montagu as Claire's primary opposition when the memorial debate shifts to a clash between conservatives and liberals over the Muslim American architect's design. Sean tries to honor his lost brother by staging anti-Muslim protest events that parallel the actual “Take Back the Memorial” movement,Footnote ⁹⁰ but he soon finds the “tight scripting” of these events to be more “enfeebling” than empowering (170, 179). His response is a transgressive “determination to escape the script” that ironically “serve[s] only to affirm it” (172): his impulse “to tug back the headscarf” of a counter-protesting Muslim student at one such event reentrenches more than it rewrites the emotional public shorthand that has cast him in the role of angry family member (171).Footnote ⁹¹ Sean plays with ease, if discomfort, this outraged part on the public stage, swearing heatedly on television that he “will never apologize for not wanting anything Islamic connected to this memorial” (207). Privately, however, he discovers the more complicated truth of his victim, Zahira Hussain, “a Columbia student double majoring in literature and economics” (205), whose speech “sounded as American” as his own and whose father opposes her choice to wear the hijab (204). Mounting evidence of his own prejudice moves Sean to apologize for pulling her headscarf and to admit his disturbing inability to “get a fix on anyone, least of all himself” because “his empathy kept settling in new, unstable places” (263). Wracked by growing self-doubt rather than empowered by racial and religious profiling, Sean mentally stammers out an uneasy confession about his empathetic thought process: “It – he – couldn't be trusted” to follow his conservative public script (263).

As Sean's liberal counterpart among the families, Claire is similarly tempted to choose a decisive public role over a conflicted personal connection to others. Claire's public persona as champion of Mo's garden design makes her sympathetic politically to the Muslim Americans whom Sean targets in his public attacks. Ironically, however, Claire's support of Mo ends up being less an advocacy for civil liberties than a declaration of war against conservatives like Sean, who is, in fact, one of the family members she has promised to represent on the memorial jury. Just as Sean begins to recognize his own unsettling empathy, Claire dismissively informs him, in a “patronizing, superior” tone, that “people like me, who can see both sides, are needed. It's called empathy.” The horrible truth here is that Claire's “unvarnished loathing” of Sean and self-righteous assumption of her own superiority belie the empathy she claims and ignore the demographic she has agreed to represent (264). Yet even as she publicly opposes Sean, Claire is privately disturbed by how her growing understanding of other viewpoints increasingly deconstructs her own:

Like Sean, Claire feels trapped by a scripted public narrative that tries to cast her in a contentious, rigidly defined role, even as she experiences firsthand the troubling power of an empathetic thought process to shape a more considered, if uncomfortable, public discourse about the attacks.

The Submission’s omniscient narrator formally enacts this thematic tension between the individual citizen's search for an elusive, complicated truth and the public discourse's rhetorical framing of a shared conception of reality. Even more than its figurative language, the novel's narrator embodies a public discourse that seeks to control and shape its participants’ perspectives by building the very framework around the terrorist attacks that Waldman seeks to break in the novel as a whole. In each chapter, the narrator presents a series of brief character-focussed snapshots separated by blank space on the page, creating the illusion of discord and distance between characters who represent different perspectives in the memorial debate. Over the course of the novel, however, as we have seen above, these characters increasingly question their own authority and begin to consider other points of view, in almost direct proportion to mounting public tension and protest in the memorial debate. Like Sean and Claire, Mo asserts publicly that “his position was an immovable object that moved everything around him,” but in truth, he admits privately, “never had he been shakier” about his own perspective (208). Waldman makes visible the narrator's increasing effort to sustain the illusion of public discord: the number of spatial gaps on each page nearly doubles between the novel's opening and conclusion, even as characters themselves become more self-conscious and sensitive to other points of view. This visible attempt to contain and organize the various viewpoints of The Submission’s many characters reveals an omniscient narrator with a fixed idea about a public in need of control. The spaces between characters’ individual stories impose the narrator's idea of discord on the text itself, when the truth is that these characters crave meaningful personal exchange far more than decisive executive action.

The Submission demonstrates the political dangers of such fixed ideas about narrative control through the character of New York's governor. The governor is busy crafting, behind the scenes of the public hearing about Mohammad Khan's memorial design, an emotionally charged event that will advance her own political career. She hires a firm called “U.S.PEAK” to manage and strategize a shift in the hearing's purpose (247), from the jury's initial intention of giving “everyone a chance to speak, to be heard,” to her own agenda of “allowing the public to vent its spleen” (243, 234). The public seems happy to vent, and the hearing quickly degenerates into an undisciplined cacophony of “heckling” that is “shouted” and “shrieked,” with “boos” and “chants of ‘Save America from Islam’ and ‘No Muslim memorial’” interrupting Mo's carefully planned defense of his architectural design (245). The media narrative decontextualizes and thus amplifies public anger and fear, according to the governor's political plan, as photo journalists’ “cameras clicked like emptied guns” (243), and reporters increasingly felt “as if the story had been edited before [they] got to write it” (247). Acting as editor in chief of this public narrative, the governor transforms her constituents’ emotional upheaval into a political reality in need of her own executive action. “I'm the governor,” she boasts. “I'm allowed to pronounce” (280). She triumphantly labels Khan's design “unsuitable” on “every news outlet in the country,” spinning her derailment of the jury's democratic deliberations as a “defense of the memorial site, of America itself, from the Islamist threat” (280, 281). In the hands of this political demagogue whose “ambition kept outflanking … imagination” as she aims for the White House, the hearing – and the memorial site itself – become opportunities not for context and comparison but for swift, decisive political action (279).

The novel explores the paralyzing power of the governor's dominant script by demonstrating its impact on a character who is even more clearly a victim of this public discourse than Mohammad Khan: Asma Anwar, the widow of an undocumented Bangladeshi janitor killed in the World Trade Center. Whereas characters like Sean and Claire find themselves locked into unpleasantly powerful public roles in the discourse of American exceptionalism that coopts victim experiences, Asma is ideologically trapped within her silent and powerless roles as Bangladeshi wife, mother, and illegal immigrant, to the point where “she no longer knew who was imprisoning her, only that the prison was well sealed” (192). Taking the stage at the public memorial hearing to assert her right to commemorate an undocumented husband, she experiences the “thrill of being, for once, at the center of things,” publicly “acknowledged as a family member,” like Sean and Claire (258). However, because Asma's central place in the public narrative is so temporary and unscripted, various partisan groups quickly and aggressively coopt her voice, ignoring her personal history in the rush to assert their own political views: the Muslim American Coordinating Council “wanted to put her in an ad campaign,” and “feminists – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – claimed her as their own” (274–75). Asma's rise to “celebrity” status only further imprisons her within a disinterested public discourse (286): “She thought her freedom here was limitless but in truth it was bounded – by a larger circle than at home, but a circle nonetheless. When she spoke out, pushed at it, crossed over it, she offended” (285). Asma's offense is a set of personal experiences that defy rather than define the political stereotypes circumscribing her. Her final scene literalizes this dangerous circumscription, as members of the media itself “circled Asma, shouting questions at her, pressing in on her with their microphones and cameras, swallowing her up” (287). Engulfed by shapers of the public discourse she disrupts by speaking up, Asma is fatally stabbed, and once again, others eagerly coopt her silenced voice, writing impassioned public accusations of imaginary murderers, from “a Wahhabi offended by a woman playing a public role” to “an Islamophobe”; from “a xenophobe” to “immigration reform activists” (293). Despite these speculations, the ultimately unsolved mystery of Asma's murder emphasizes shared public responsibility for a post-9/11 political discourse that leaves no room for the personal reality of this undocumented Muslim widow.

BREAKING THE TEMPORAL FRAME: COLUMBIA's ORAL HISTORY PROJECT AND THE SUBMISSION

Waldman suggests in The Submission that changing this public discourse requires both political and temporal space. As we have seen, the novel models the de- and reconstruction of political space through its own literary form, but its epilogue extends that counter-memorial approach across time, encouraging readers to “link what happened” on September 11, 2001, “to what came after,” as Waldman suggests they should.Footnote ⁹² The initial epigraph opens a conversation that becomes fully visible only in the closing epilogue, twenty years after the memorial debate's conclusion, and the epigraph and epilogue thus engage in a critical dialogue that undercuts the novel's rigid four-part structure. The epigraph begins by illustrating the ideological power of post-9/11 stereotypes to shape Western views of the “unidentified Pashto poet” who composed that epigraph. “Like the cypress tree,” the poet writes, “which holds its head high and is free within the confines of a garden, I, too, feel free in this world, and I am not bound by its attachments.” The initial lack of historical or literary context for this unidentified poet's declaration of freedom leaves readers to consider a reactionary public discourse that too quickly and easily might frame the Pashtun as Taliban, the poet as terrorist, and the garden as martyr's paradise. The epilogue revisits and critiques the power of this discourse to put the poet in his political place by adding literary and historical context to the epigraph. Translating the poet's metaphor for himself as free individual into a physical drawing of a single unbounded cypress, the epilogue begins by self-consciously deconstructing the controlling grid of trees that introduces each of the novel's other sections. The epilogue thus creates intellectual space for reflection by breaking the novel's structural frame, and temporal space by leaping forward into the future. Mohammad Khan remembers in the epilogue how his “imagination was made suspect” and he was “reinvented by others” so “he couldn't recognize himself” during the memorial debate (330). Juxtaposing this idea with the epilogue's visual reminder of the epigraph's poet-as-free-cypress metaphor, the novel invites readers to think critically about powerful post-9/11 stereotypes that seek to define the political other. The contextualization and conversation between epigraph and epilogue ironically frame the novel with the idea of breaking the inadequate and limiting frames of post-9/11 public discourse in the United States.

Columbia University's 9/11 Oral History Project similarly aims to reframe this national discourse by inviting individual volunteers to “speak about their experiences outside the frameworks quickly developed by official media and government accounts,”Footnote ⁹³ and thus to challenge official representations of 9/11 “as an exceptional event that resisted any serious attempts at historical analysis.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Of course, speaking outside official frameworks is never entirely possible; individual views of an event both result from and comment upon the public discourse they shape, as we have seen in The Submission. Although the Oral History Project clearly shares the counter-memorial impulse to build space for reflection about both private and public discourse, its establishment in 2001, immediately after the attacks and ten years before the opening of the Reflecting Absence memorial and publication of The Submission, gave its interviewers and subjects little time to do so. Nevertheless, the archive's collection of interviews with over six hundred individuals from “a broad spectrum of ethnic and professional categories” embodies its promise to write collective history in a chorus of individual voices,Footnote ⁹⁵ featuring subjects ranging from public intellectuals (like New York Times reporter Dena Kleiman and physicist Neil Degrasse Tyson) to public servants (like NYPD officer Scott Strauss and FDNY firefighter Scott Greenleaf), from business people (like Cantor Fitzgerald's Bernard A. Weinstein and small business owner Claire Cavanah) to artists (like comic artist Art Spiegelman and street painter Antonio “Chico” Garcia).Footnote ⁹⁶ The interviews typically open with a reminder that these subjects’ personal experiences are part of the ongoing public record. “We're going to be using this interview forty, fifty, or a hundred years from now,” one interviewer asserts, while another reminds a subject that his interview “will be looked at thirty or forty years from now.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Regardless of the individual's ability to grasp his or her place in the larger picture, the archive clearly aimed to make that historical context visible to those studying the history of the attacks.

Despite this long-term goal, making sense of their own personal relations to the public record was difficult for individuals in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, without the benefit of time and space. Although subjects repeatedly expressed the twin desires to “get something back” for themselves and to “contribute and give you something,” they often could not create enough emotional distance to frame their experience of the attacks collectively and historically.Footnote ⁹⁸ Like the “Portraits of Grief,” early interviews often rely on patriotism to frame traumatic experience. One police officer working on rescue at Ground Zero, for example, insists on the “good that came out of that incident” because the “whole country” came together to “fight this and stand shoulder to shoulder” in the “war on terror.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Even those who assert that “we should criticize this country” are sometimes surprised to find that their “patriotism went through the roof” in 2001, to the point where, as one writer says, “I wanted to walk through the streets with a flag wrapped around my body.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Such early interviews illustrate the power of a national narrative to help individuals frame an overwhelming experience that seemed to many “surreal” or “like a movie” at the time of the attacks.Footnote ¹⁰¹

More explicitly than any other counter-memorial discussed in this essay, Columbia's 9/11 Oral History Project aimed to create time, as well as space, for reflection on how people think about what they think about “9/11.” Columbia's archivists and interviewers gently encouraged subjects to revisit and revise their initial attempts to frame the attacks by following up with a second interview a year or two later. These follow-up interviews invite subjects to reflect more self-consciously than was immediately possible upon their own and their nation's initial responses. For example, Kathleen Spicer, an artist with siblings in law enforcement and the military, felt in 2001 that “making art was a ridiculous and selfish thing to do” because artists were “not saving anybody's life. We didn't rescue anybody.” Reminded of this stance during her second interview in 2003, however, she describes a strategic response that she developed to her initial professional despair: “I interviewed myself,” she says. “I pretended that you actually were asking me questions. And I wrote down questions to ask myself, and then I answered them.”Footnote ¹⁰² This distancing technique allows her to recognize how she “had never thought about” before the attacks “what people thought of the artwork” or even “cared what anybody thought,” a realization that then yields “some of the best work I've made, probably ever.” Similarly, in 2001, New York Times journalist Dena Kleiman saw great value in her journalistic work on the “Portraits of Grief,” which she says helped her to keep “the tragedy very much in my mind.” By 2003, however, she, like Waldman, recognizes that the task of articulating the large-scale political and historical meaning of the attacks is perhaps more complicated than creating a journalistic shrine: she concludes that even when one is “very proud of being an American,” the attacks offer “a perfect excuse” to threaten “some of our civil liberties in the look and hunt for troublemakers, threats.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Of course, not all of Columbia's subjects became meta-interviewers or self-critical journalists, but most began to “link what happened to what came after,” reflecting to some extent on their own perspectives through time.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

All of the counter-memorials discussed in this essay put such self-reflection in political context, emphasizing the ongoing and necessary connection between private members of society and their public discourses. Like Reflecting Absence, which continues to invite visitors “to be reflective and to do that not alone but as a community with others,”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Columbia's 9/11 Oral History Project aims “to extend the power of interpretation of the events of September 11, 2001, to individuals in New York City whose stories provide critical perspectives on the immediate and lasting impact of the terrorist attacks and its cultural, economic and political legacy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The archive thus values not just the critical perspective of each individual, but also the collective power of these various points of view. Visitors to the archive participate in this collective experience by considering their own points of view in relation to those of the interview subjects. While the structure of the interview process allowed these volunteer subjects some temporal space for reflection, the archival collection itself creates even greater physical, intellectual, and temporal space for scholars and students, who can visit the library itself to read and interpret early and later interview transcripts. Visitors thus build through their own research a collection of these “life story interviews,” which complicate and expand both their own perspectives and “‘official’ versions of the story defined by the media, government, and private and public institutions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In much the same way, The Submission’s style and structure invite readers to participate in a literary deconstruction of narrative authority and to join a community of characters and readers engaged together in fostering debate. Like other counter-memorials, The Submission places those who visit its pages in a community of global citizens who must take responsibility for the political decisions made in their names. Rather than accepting official stories about the terrorist attacks and their aftermath, reflective readers choose to use their imaginations, thinking about how they think about both the attacks and their nation's ongoing global political response.