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Research at the Centre for American Studies is examining how the 9/11 atrocity has changed our language and our sense of realism.

9/11... at a loss for words

One of the greatest losses of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was our grip on reality. New research at the Centre for American Studies at the University of Leicester is examining the impact of the atrocity on language, literature – and our perception of the world.

In September 2001 Catherine Morley was a student, and she clearly recalls the visual impact of the terrible 9/11 atrocity which seemed to be almost the stuff of fiction.

“I was standing in front of a television shop and every single television was showing the same image of a plane crashing in to the side of the World Trade Centre. I was hooked! Obviously it was a dreadful, terrible and traumatic thing and a horrifying terrorist attack. But at the same time I thought, ‘Wow — this is a real DeLillo moment that has almost been anticipated by his fiction!”

Don DeLillo writes fiction on terrorism –and a decade earlier had written about how the future belonged to terrorists.

Now a lecturer in the School of English at Leicester, Dr Morley is not alone in her reaction to the terrorist attacks. As writers were called upon to make sense of what the world had witnessed, many commented on the surreal nature of the attacks.

“What was immediately striking about a great number of these writers’ responses was the emphasis on the visual or on the actual spectacle of the attacks. Many writers described themselves as impotent, as though they were frozen in front of the television screen or, in the case of the New York writers, watching from some city vantage point. Indeed, for many writers in the weeks and months after the attacks, the heightened visibility of the attacks seemed to render them ‘too real’. So the problem for the writer was how to write about events which seemed to defy the logic of traditional narrative realism, and which presented a story that the whole world was already familiar with through an unending televisual loop.”

Dr Morley argues that the widespread soul-searching of writers in the days and weeks after the attacks is an important gauge of the public position of the writer in the contemporary world. In contrast with the later fictional responses to 9/11, most of the immediate responses to 9/11 were non-fictional and subjective, describing various writers’ proximity to events. One of the most rehearsed observations of the image of the planes hitting the towers was the unreality of these events, leading some writers to argue that the attacks can only be seen as a kind of fiction, and suggesting that one of the greatest losses of the terrorist attacks was our sense of reality.

Another casualty of this war was the ability of language to articulate what we had witnessed. As Dr Morley puts it: “In light of this attack on American soil, the first foreign attack since the Second World War, it is not surprising that American writers became more subjective and less dispassionate in their immediate responses, presenting raw personal grief and their perceived sense of the futility of their literary endeavours. There was a general feeling among writers that words would inevitably fail in the face of the extremely visual nature of the attacks.”

For writers whose stories harness the raw emotion provoked by the attacks, language seems redundant in the face of the terror and the televisual spectacle: “Words alone cannot untie the knot of grief nor can they adequately compete with images of mass devastation. So in their groping sense of confusion, these writers’ stories offer an aesthetic of rawness. At the same time, though, the events of September 11 engendered a new reality, so close and so familiar it was ‘unreal’. When reality becomes a nightmare, realism itself falls apart. And in this context the textual combination of the literary and the visual might come closest to capturing the terrible trauma of 11 September 2001.”

In Dr Morley’s seminar groups, discussions about writers’ responses to 9/11, and about the ability of language to capture the totality of our experience, have made for some lively discussions.

“Students are very interested in it,” says Dr Morley. “I think this is because it still feels very relevant and of course they all remember it well. In fact, I find that I am integrating quite a lot of 9/11 fiction into my courses all the time.”

Her studies reveal that 9/11 not only influenced our sense of realism and our ability to express this realism – it also led to the manipulation of language, and a rhetoric – ‘infected with fear.’

Indeed, Dr Morley’s analysis of US government documents finds an ‘extraordinarily pervasive rhetoric of fear.’

She examines different literary responses to the culture of fear and the so-called ‘war on terror’ looking at how they explore government surveillance, infringement of civil liberties and the role of the media in the new global environment of distrust. Her research reveals how US military rhetoric and government-fuelled paranoia are conflated within the fiction of the post-9/11 era.

The effect, says Morley, is to make a rather deliberate, if subtle, point, which acknowledges the complicity of the West in the propagation of the current state of fear.

Indeed, argues Morley, “It has done so to such an extent that the raised terror alerts which are regularly announced by the global media seem to have engendered a heightened sense of reality, bordering on the surreal in its capacity for inspiring terror.”

Literary artists continue to add to the body of comment on what was a terrible historical event. And their reactions, embodied in the fictions produced after 9/11, continue to challenge our perceptions and provoke new discussion.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2009 Edition of LE1 magazine/Annual Report 2007-08, which you can view online by clicking here .