Please bring your copies of The Road to class, too. As you read both the 9/11 readings in the Norton Anthology and The Road for Friday, comment below on both the aesthetics and the politics of the readings. What do the texts say about our times? What assessment do they give of the future?
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Literature after 9/11
As you read the excerpts in the Norton Anthology's new "Writing in a Time of Terror: September 11, 2001," think about the questions I posed in class as we were discussing The Road: How did 9/11 change literature? How do writers help us process trauma and work through historical crises? What is the relationship, broadly speaking, between literature and history? Can historical events change literary styles and sensibilities? How does literature create historical memory?
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The selected writings show how variable author’s approaches are to dealing with trauma and coping with the emotions and implications of 9/11. Updike’s piece was most powerful and helpful to me. He addressed the events as we remember them: chronologically and in the everyday language of news anchors and the discussions we all had on that day. By painting the scene for me so vividly and articulately, Updike’s piece allows me to uncover the emotions I felt from that day in a way my (slightly repressed) memory cannot do alone. I was especially struck by the way Updike closed. He employed patriotic language about “Freedom” in the same way I expect to see it used as an ideological tool to justify warfare. But he did so in the way I’ve always felt the language of Freedom should be used: to encourage America’s embrace of diversity and embrace of individuality.
ReplyDeleteSome poetry felt completely useless to me as an approach to addressing my emotions about the event, as the works were so obscure that I wouldn’t have recognized it being about 9/11 without its location in the Norton. “On the Eve of Our Mutually Assured Destruction,” “Shoulders,” and “Fragments Part 3” were the poems I found too obscure to relate with. Of the works which clearly addressed 9/11, the most traumatic motif were the bodies falling from the building. Updike, Hahn, and Ray each mentioned this aspect of 9/11. This has always seemed to me that most horrific part of that day as well. The attacks forced people to decide between two horrific ways to die, instead of inflicting an instant, less painful death, and exposed their deaths to the most public forum in the world of downtown New York City. By writing about this particular aspect of the day, literature is creating an historical memory of what was most prominent, significant and painful about an event. Literature marks the topics worth remembering for history, focusing less on the aesthetics of a skyscraper crumbling in downtown New York and more on the infliction of pain on innocent, individual civilians by an act of war.
The poem in the 9/11 selection that impacted me the most was "Six Months After" by David Ray. This poem talks about how there will always be destruction and pain in the world. I liked the ending when talking about the crying fireman it says "…and that is what it means to understand history." This poem taught me that for one to truly understand history, the destruction and pain of it, one has to experience sorrow. It is easy to read and write history with a sterile heart, as seen with "The 9/11 Commission Report." But, that is not true history; true history is the emotions felt by the individuals who witnessed it firsthand. It is important to remember that each of the people one reads about in history books felt real joy and real pain. The only history that one can understand completely is one's own personal history. That is what this poem taught me.
ReplyDeleteKimiko Hahn’s poem “Her Very Eyes” really caught my attention. It seems like a real eye opener when a little kid who is supposed to be innocent is aware of tragedy. I think poems that approach a tragedy in a manner more like this one appear more sincere. This poem seemed to depict history in a realistic way; where even an innocent child is affected and tragedy is known by all.
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