The 'Image-Event' in the Early Post-9/11 Novel Summary
In “The Days After,” an introduction to “Reflections by our authors in the aftermath” assembled by Chicago University Press and available on their website, we read:
At the moment of catastrophe we fall silent. Language fails. / The words come back; understanding takes much longer. As we return to normal – or to the state of heightened alertness we now call normal – we return to the task of explicating a world which seems suddenly to have become inexplicable.
Frédéric Beigbeder, one of many to have compared the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to the Holocaust, summed up his novel, Windows on the World, as “simply an attempt – doomed, perhaps – to describe the indescribable” (55 [8:46]). Art Spiegelman said in his graphic novel, in several of the smoky gray Maus-like panels
I remember my father trying to describe what the smoke in Auschwitz was like. / … The closest he got was telling me it was ‘indescribable.’ / … That's exactly what the air in lower Manhattan smelled like after Sept.11! (3)
These are not the only instances of linking 9/11 to the earlier, much larger, but also technologically orchestrated, horrific crime against humanity. Similarly, these are not the only instances when “indescribable” is paradoxically, the most descriptive word, “inexplicable” the aptest explanation. In a comment about the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel said that it is not possible to express the inexpressible, let alone to show it on the screen (meaning film, qtd. in Cataluccio, 170).
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- The 'Image-Event' in the Early Post-9/11 NovelLiterary Representations of Terror after September 11, 2001, pp. 141 - 144Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2012