Amy Cook, "Where There’s Smoke, There’s Blue Sky: The Hallmarks of 9/11’s Imagery in Prose" (Assay 11.2)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
11.2

Amy Cook

Where There’s Smoke, There’s Blue Sky:
The Hallmarks of 9/11’s Imagery in Prose

Like tens of millions of Americans, I watched the towers fall that Tuesday morning from the safety of a television screen. Hours later, I walked around my New Jersey college campus, trying to reconcile the pristine azure sky with the smoke-drenched footage that marked the end of my adolescence. The contrast astonished me; it reverberated through my body. In the days and weeks that followed September 11, 2001, I worked as a Salvation Army volunteer, witnessing firsthand the monstrous wreck that the world called Ground Zero. I had no words for it. On commuter trains, I wrote poem after poem, trying to put on the page an event that was horrifying, extraordinary, and, as we now know, the most commonly shared media experience in history. It’s estimated that two billion people watched the attacks that day, either in real-time or on the news broadcasts that immediately followed (Graff). That’s more than three times the amount of people who, thirty-two years before, watched two Americans land on the moon.

September 11th was unique in its viewership, but also in the way that it was viewed: via livestream, and then, on loop, ad infinitum. Breaking news, of course, had been carried live before. I was born the same year as the 24-hour news cycle, and in my own childhood, I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall from my living room couch (age 9). I watched Baby Jessica being rescued from a well in Texas, from my bedroom (age 7). Millions of us tuned in, at work, home, and school, when what had been a normal, if delayed, space shuttle launch turned into the Challenger disaster (age 5). The images from those events, too, played on loop for days.

Those moments, in context, required a more complex understanding of history than was available to me as a child. But even then, on some basic level, I understood what I was watching. That was not the case at age 21, in my dorm room. On that mid-September morning, fully grown and mostly educated, I had been lulled into the belief that what I was seeing was the aftermath of an accident—or at worst, in an isolated act of terror. At 9:03 a.m., the world was simultaneously disabused of that notion.

The news anchors raced to catch up, and posed questions that writers would struggle with for decades. What did these images mean? How would we interpret them? In the days, weeks, and months that followed the attacks, it seemed there were an infinite number of interpretations of a singular day. In an interview, novelist Jess Walter said, “We all witnessed the same event, but we didn’t see the same thing” (“P.S. Insights, Interviews & More” 3). The breaking news of it all meant that as the networks raced to find eyewitnesses, those people came at the event from a different (literal) angle than the news helicopters, hovering in the air. On CBS, anchor Bryant Gumbel was interviewing Theresa Renaud, the wife of an Early Show producer, who called in from the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. In the footage, Renaud is live on the air when the second plane crashes into the South Tower. But in the moment, the CBS viewers see no plane at all, only a fireball in the lower left of their screens. The camera is aimed too high. Renaud reacts, shouting, “Oh there's another one—another plane just hit—oh my god, another plane has just hit—it hit another building—flew right into the middle of it—explosions!" (Morales). Gumbel struggles, having not seen the same thing, but now watching the aftermath. He is almost incredulous: “You saw a plane?”

The Gumbel reaction is an interesting metaphor for what was to come. The genre of 9/11 literature is born in this mismatch; the attacks upended a country, even a way of life. But the images that defined it made it difficult to speak about. The goal of 9/11 literature, and in particular, nonfiction, is to put the reader in the very body of the narrator: as eyewitness, spectator, survivor, and even victim. To make them feel what it was like to be there. But that begins with how to communicate.

The Function of Imagery

Dr. Dori Laub, an Israeli-American psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who devoted his career to studying trauma, states that “September 11 was an encounter with something that makes no sense, an event that fits in nowhere” (204); as a surprise attack, it is reminiscent of the one on Pearl Harbor, but drastically different in immediate audience. In our study of literature, and as writers, September 11th must fit somewhere, even if we have to build the scaffolding to recognize it. There must be ways for writers to come at this event in terms of craft, and as Kristiaan Versluys writes in September 11 and the Novel, “there is no way even something as indescribable as what transpired on that sunny Tuesday morning can stay out of the reach of symbol and metaphor” (3). And there it is: a way to start talking.

The genre of 9/11 literature is characterized by, and is uniquely effective, due to its inextricability from imagery. I use the word genre in the rhetorical sense because to a significant extent, all forms of writing about 9/11 (essay, journalism, fiction, and even poetry) rely on the same elements of craft—and they don’t really deviate. It’s fairly remarkable, for example, for repetition to be deployed in a sonnet, an essay, and a novel with the same goals, methods and outcomes. The particular, specific, and complicated use of imagery defines 9/11 literature as a genre.

For the purposes of this study, I limited myself to prose, and, in particular, prose describing the attacks as they played out in Manhattan. Poetry is undoubtably an important arm of 9/11 literature, but poetry is both an immediately accessible and volatile medium, from free verse to highly formal. The barrier to entry is, at times, simply emotion. On the contrary, novelists, essayists and journalists were tasked not just with translating image and emotion onto the page, but their stories had to adhere to conventional rules of sentence structure and grammar. There are characters and narrators to consider. Even those prose writers who are more experimental, straying from conventional narrative, stick closely to the elements of imagery as I describe them here, and use them in traditional ways. While all forms of 9/11 prose provide us with examples of these elements of craft working together, what strikes me is how novelists like Don DeLillo and Ian McEwan produced prose in essay form, while using the elements of imagery in the exact same manner. There is something about the events of this day that transcends medium and blurs the lines between what we think of as distinct forms.

In addition to sensory imagery, there are three additional elements of craft that employ sensory imagery so that the reader understands and experiences the moment in history in a way that no area of literature did prior. These include repetition, which mimics the trauma experience in the body, figurative language, which allows the mind to wander while taking in otherwise horrific ideas, and motif, an expansion of all of these elements, which has the elasticity to transform an evolving set of images into something much more complex.

The “tropes” of that day, which are primarily sight images, are recognizable because they can be seen in any Hollywood disaster film, made before or since. Fire, ash, smoke and dust, the last of which smoldered over the Manhattan skyline for months. Paper, be it the paper that exploded out of the office buildings or the paper used to create missing persons posters. The flight of those forced out of the buildings, seeking a moment of breathable air. And, of course, the extraordinary color of the sky, with its absence of clouds —the morning of the attacks was exquisite, as if the screenwriters had conjured it themselves. Artist Spencer Finch, later tasked with creating an installation for the 9/11 memorial and museum, created “2,983 individual watercolor squares” each a different shade of blue, encapsulating the idea that “just like our perception of color, our memories share a common point of reference” (“Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning”).

What I’ve attempted to do is not survey the field of 9/11 prose, but to draw it in the way a sketch artist might, a way that allows it to be recognizable. (Anyone familiar with the field may notice brevity-mandated omissions such as Brian Doyle’s “Leap” or Julie Buxbaum’s Hope and other Punchlines, both of which fit neatly into the genre as well.) This is particularly important, as 9/11 imagery, while instantly discernible to many on a screen, has had a profound impact on the way that prose is written. September 11th ushered in a new era, in politics and prose; in the titular essay from the collection, The Second Plane, English essayist Martin Amis refers to the events that followed September 11, 2001, as the “the apotheosis of the postmodern era—the era of images and perceptions” (4-5). The essay, originally published in The Guardian just one week after the terror attacks, imagines United Airlines Flight 175, which crashed into the South Tower that morning, as “eagerly alive, and galvanised with malice, and wholly alien” (3). That plane, as noted, was the second plane hijacked that day, the one that angled itself and aimed directly for the center of the building—the plane that Bryant Gumbel didn’t see. This was, as Amis states, “the core moment of September 11” (“What Will Survive of Us” 132); it would not be the last plane, of course, but it was the plane we watched together.

From that moment on, writers tried to make sense of what they had seen, by transforming the images being projected at us into art, palatable or otherwise. As a nation, the transformation was imperative; according to Versluys, “telling the tale is the first step of getting on with life, integrating what happened into a meaningful narrative” (14). Invoking otherworldly and sinister pictures, Amis did what so many 9/11-genre writers would attempt, and, indeed, what most writers wish to accomplish in general. He helped bring order, understanding, and even beauty to the unfathomable. My survey of 9/11 literature found eerily similar craft elements in the pens of so many prose writers, from all walks of life.

The Beginnings

In an essay, Ian McEwan boldly wrote, one day after the attacks, “We knew we were living through a time that we would never be able to forget. We also knew, though it was too soon to wonder how or why, that the world would never be the same” (“Beyond belief”). This is not an outrageous claim. What is staggering, to me, about McEwan’s reporting, published online 25 hours after the second tower fell, is that like many eyewitnesses do, he gets it wrong. He claims, “We were watching death on an unbelievable scale, but we saw no one die.” McEwan speaks for himself, maybe, but makes the mistake of using the first-person plural. He, perhaps, did not see anyone die. But plenty of others did; plenty of them filmed or took photos of death. Some of it aired on live television. One of the most important essays written about September 11th, written by Tom Junod, describes a man’s impending death, as he leapt from the North Tower, captured in a photo by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew. Junod goes to some lengths to describe the unfathomable decisions faced by those who jumped, and the inevitable aftermath of their “choice”. His prose, in concert with Drew’s photographs, does force the reader to contemplate very difficult concepts. It is nonfiction writing at its best.

But McEwan’s contention inadvertently makes an interesting point in what is uncommon in 9/11 literature. There is a taboo, or a third rail, that few writers approach—the appearance of death itself. Narratives of the planes’ passengers, or of those lost in the towers, are rare on the page, even more so the further we travel forward in time. Richard Drew’s falling man photograph (which does not depict the exact moment of death) appeared in newspapers across the country on September 12, 2001, including The New York Times. There was a strong public outcry, intimating that the photograph was grotesque and an invasion of privacy. And in the two decades since, images like that one have been largely suppressed, in the media and elsewhere. These so-called jumpers, who leapt either by choice or because they were forced out of the buildings, are fairly absent from the genre: even “the 9/11 Commission, which has compiled the most detailed history of the day, mentioned those who jumped only as they affected the people on the streets below” (Flynn and Dwyer). This, despite the fact that “[t]hose who came through the windows of the towers provided the starkest, most harrowing evidence of the desperate conditions inside” (Flynn and Dwyer).

But public did (and does not) not have the stomach to deeply consider these people’s fates. To complicate matters, Junod’s essay misidentified the falling man as Norberto Hernandez, a claim his family immediately denied, and one that was disproven years later. Discussions of skin tone and class-based uniforms were taken up in American discourse. From the perspective of surviving families, ethical concerns abounded. And writers are often concerned with getting it wrong—or even worse, getting it right, and in doing so, invading the privacy of victims and their loved ones. So when we talk about the imagery of 9/11, we must remember that to this day, it remains incomplete, and involves treacherous waters that many are hesitant to sail.

You can’t blame writers for avoiding the unmentionable. Amis writes, “After a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12, 2001, all the writers on earth were considering the course that Lenin menacingly urged on Maxim Gorky: “a change of occupation” (“The Voice of the Lonely Crowd” 11). But if Amis is indeed correct, it was for many writers a momentary dalliance. And thank goodness. It is, of course, invaluable that we can teach future generations about what happened that day by letting them watch the footage, as it happened in the moment. But it is critical that they seek out other mediums, as well, and that they learn the power of the writer to keep them in the moment, on that day, on a page, through their mastery of the image. It is imagery felt inside the body.

“Planes Going Into Buildings”:
How Repetition Allows Art to Imitate Life

Repetition is a valuable tool in the craft of trauma-based prose; on the page, it mimics repetition in the body—it can move mountains, merely by the hammering; over and over. On September 20, 2001, on the first post-9/11 episode, Jon Stewart, hosting The Daily Show, said, “Television is nothing if not redundant.” He’s referring here to the proliferation of talk and late-night shows that had, in the prior days, struggled to figure out what to say, as they came back on the air, following the news blackout that followed the terror attacks. But he may as well have been referencing the events of 9/11 themselves, and what writers would subsequently do to make those events meaningful to future readers. If one saw the footage of United 175 hitting the South Tower one time, they saw it one thousand times—just that first day.

In the body, trauma is the unconscious return to a state of agony. On the page, that agony is being experienced by our characters or narrators, who are so overwhelmed by what they experience, that the page is flooded with the image. Professor Cathy Caruth, author of Trauma: Explorations in Memory, defines the body’s response to trauma as, “the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits” (5). The writer uses repetition to allow the reader to experience in their own bodies what the narrators are in theirs. The best example of this in 9/11 literature is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I chose, and will return to this work of fiction, mostly because of its length, which allows for a plethora of examples. One of the novel’s three narrators, a grandmother who has both lived through the death of her son on 9/11 and, decades before, the deaths of her family in the Dresden bombings, writes in epistolary form to her young grandson, Oskar. In the chapter, “My Feelings” Grandma (the reader never learns her name) re-lives September 11th, through harrowing, simple, repetition of imagery:

Planes going into buildings.
   Bodies falling.
   People waving shirts out of high windows.
Planes going into buildings.
   Bodies falling.
Planes going into buildings.
   Bodies falling.
   People covered in gray dust.
   Bodies falling.
   Buildings falling.
   Planes going into buildings.
Planes going into buildings.
   Buildings falling.
   People waving shirts out of high windows.
   Bodies falling.
   Planes going into buildings. (230)

On the page, this looks like a poem, or perhaps even a lyric, forcing the reader to experience the repetition with a different, faster cadence. The heartbeat quickens. The mind’s eye is made to experience the horror. The language is simple and unadorned, which, again, allows the reader to hasten the rhythm and pace. Two similar passages reoccur before the point of view switches in the next chapter. The reader is inundated with the mind-bending pictures that the day brings to mind. Safran Foer is doing here what many September 11th writers have done, and, more globally, what writers depicting moments of intense trauma have done. They not only conjure these memories, but they replay them to the point of exhaustion.

A lyrical example of repetition, and how it works in partnership with imagery, can be found in Charles Bernstein’s “Report from Liberty Street,” a nonfiction essay and eye-witness account of the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to Ground Zero, written in the weeks following the attacks. Amidst a collage of images, Bernstein invokes a refrain: “They thought they were going to heaven” (42-46); this sentence appears ten times in four pages. By “they” Bernstein is referencing the nineteen hijackers, but he does not mention them otherwise, until late in the essay. Instead, he weaves the refrain through a bombardment of visual cues that invoke the imagery of a nation at war: “these vast and hollow trunks of steel…”; “jeeps and tents and soldiers in combat fatigues”; and “votive lights and candles in coffee mugs” (42, 43, 44). The essay wanders from these in-camera descriptions to more philosophical and political conjecture, but the refrain steers it back to image, time and again. In contrast to Safran Foer’s very literal description of the events, Bernstein comes at these pictures from a different direction, and invokes sharp contrasts; between war and peace, between soldiers and heaven. Towards the end of the essay, the length of the segments between the refrains contracts, another example of how a writer uses repetition to invoke speed and movement.

Bernstein even references repetition, writing, “The movies keep playing in my head” and “We hear a lot of one song from 1918 by Irving Berlin” (44). There is something terrifically meta about mentioning repetition in an essay that employs it, to describe an event which was seared into our minds by the sheer number of times that we bore witness.

In addition to speed and contrast, Jennifer Shute puts repetition to another use in her essay, “Instructions for Surviving the Unprecedented (Break Glass in Case of Emergency, If Glass Is Not Already Broken).” In this essay, the multifaceted word choices are what makes this repetition significant. Take section 3: “The phones will go dead. All the phones. You will not understand this at first and will keep trying different phones: cell phones, neighbors’ phones, even the payphone on the corner, where people are queuing up, numbly, though all the phones are dead” (Shute 271). We have not just the seven instances of the word “phone” here, but they are deployed in such a way that conjures panic, as if using a trial-and-error approach of contacting a loved one. Shute starts with her topic sentence, and then clues the reader in to how desperate New Yorkers were to reach anyone. Here, the word “phone” does not just mean the physical object, but it means connection, and the chantlike use of the word gives the reader a chance to inhabit that day, and to experience despair through the litany of reiteration. In contrast to the late-breaking speed of Bernstein’s refrain, six of the seven uses of the word “phone” are towards the beginning of this section. The delay of the last “phone” slows the prose down. It is akin to experiencing this melancholy, but on a delay.

In the same essay, we have the word “masks.” Shute writes, in section 13:

You will see people wearing masks; their eyes will meet yours, over their masks, solemn and grim. You will buy yourself a surgical mask, a pack of ten. You will feel stupid; you will put the mask on upside down. The sight of masked people in the streets, masked children, will frighten you more than the police barricades and the military jets, more than the mass of smoke over the mutilated skyline, more even than the sirens’ never-ending wail. Because you know the masks are useless. (274)

The repetition does some neat work here. Shute adds it, even when the sentence could be understood without it: “You will see people wearing masks; their eyes will meet yours… solemn and grim” works perfectly well without the “over their masks” where I’ve introduced ellipses. But the repetition forces the mind’s eye to see the masks again, a sight that the narrator points out as frightening. Just as “phone” invites panic, “masks” invites fear, and especially fear of the unknown. The pivot from “masked people” to “masked children” as to be utterly specific as to what worries the narrator, is a successful contrast to the comparison of the jets, the smoke, the barricades and the skyline, pictures that are much more widely associated with 9/11.

Shute, like Bernstein, makes a meta-reference to the repetition that she so deftly deals with in prose. In the 10th section, she writes, “You will end up doing what everyone is doing. You will watch TV. The repetition of images will not dull their impact: the repetition of the unthinkable, at first, renders the unthinkable more, rather than less, unthinkable. You will understand nothing” (273). Here, Shute uses the word “repetition” twice, and the word “unthinkable” three times in one sentence, so closely smothered that the syllables trip over themselves. I think this is important for writers of prose to notice. Our words, especially when we employ repetition, are not just read, but read out loud, either literally or in the mind (again, activating the body). There’s a strange and eerie musicality here that invokes a strange and harrowing time. By drumming these pictures through the reader’s mind, these authors recreate a moment in history for those who were there, and deliver it to those who were not. The prose can be slowed down, or sped up, by the number of times a word or phrase comes back. Repetition is extremely important in that it triggers the memory, thus making an image more easily retrievable to the brain and body.

Professor of Comparative Literature Hanna Meretoja, in her 2020 essay, “Philosophies of Trauma” noted that “modernist and postmodernist trauma fiction have developed certain textual strategies to performatively give expression to trauma… foregrounding repetition” (26). Safran Foer’s work especially, but all of the writers described here, do this incredibly effectively. Rather than the redundancy that Jon Stewart claimed to be an obstacle, repetition here serves to unlock a method of understanding the purpose of literature. The 24-hour news cycle may have been twenty years old at the time, but the genre of 9/11 literature was nascent, and relied on the reiteration that made those news cycles irresistible. Alone, repetition is powerful. In orchestration with the craft elements to come, it is inextricable from the genre.

“Shall I tell you about the smell?”: The Magic of Sensory Detail

What did the air smell like, in the days that followed the 9/11 attacks? What did it sound like when the towers came down? What did it feel like to walk through streets of ash? Some of these details are readily available by video replay. But they don’t quite capture the sense of being there. In his study of the genre, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror, Martin Randall writes, “There is then a profound feeling that 9/11—or more precisely, the synecdoche of the film footage of the WTC attacks—stands for itself, as a ‘documentary’ of the attacks, as news footage, that 9/11, so to speak, is the image, and vice versa” (73). This gets at, again, the idea that the medium of television (and early internet) brought the attacks to a global audience, and they could, as I did, imagine what it was like to be there, from the safety of their homes. This should, of course, be dismissed as inadequate. When I visited Ground Zero, three days later, as the pile of steel still blustered with smoke, I could tell that my impressions from television had been deficient at best. Technology has enabled us to “be” in all sorts of places, around the world. In 2025, artificial intelligence is taking us even further. However, for better and worse, there is nothing that replaces being there. Of having stood there.

One note, here. I have largely omitted somatosensory imagery, or the sensory image of touch. Touch does overlap a few of the other senses, and to the extent that it intersects with those, I have described them. It is, perhaps, an afterthought to writers, eager to describe the most salient sensory images. But in my study of 9/11 literature, it is the least commonly described sense, at least on its own terms.

Smell and Taste

So much of 9/11 imagery is grounded in the olfactory and (surprisingly) gustatory experience. Paul Auster, in a short, bifurcated essay called “Random Notes – September 11, 2001, 4:00 P.M.; Underground” describes the air as having a “terrible stinging odor: flaming plastic, electric wire, building materials” (34). He employs here both adjective and noun to trigger a reader’s imagination. The readers are probably quite familiar with an odor that stings, and while they may have never smelled burning plastic, wire or building materials, they will, perhaps, now connect these in their minds, try even to smell something that isn’t there. Again, putting the day in the body. Lev Grossman, in the hermit crab essay “Pitching September 11th” refers to this odor as “the pervasive smell of burning insulation which ruins his turkey sub from Blimpie’s” (124). Here, Grossman not only attaches adjective to noun, but gives the reader a second smell and taste to consider—now the nose is working twice as hard. And Jessica Hagedorn, in “Notes from a New York Diary” goes into exhaustive detail:

Shall I tell you about the smell? The sweet, nauseating smell of burning rubber, melting plastic and dead bodies? Yesterday was another beautiful day in Manhattan. Warm, sunny, breezy. But the warmer and windier it is, the worse it gets. The smells are everywhere downtown, carried by the wind. Time to summon the shamans. To exorcize the angry spirits, and bless the living and the dead. You can feel it, most days. Bad energy buried in the rubble. (136)

With this passage, we have the grim recognition that the smells are that of death—the same smells of which Jennifer Shute states, “You won’t allow yourself to think about what they are” (273). This short passage also moves us forward in time. It is a memorable-to-9/11 factor that the stench in the air not only lingered, but traveled—and that the early fall weather contrasted the smell so devastatingly. Hagedorn also mentions, “I eat without appetite” indicating to the reader the absence of taste, in a new world dominated by smell; “the warmer and windier it is, the worse it gets. The smells are everywhere downtown, carried by the wind” (135-136). What could possibly be appetizing at a time like that? In the final section of her essay, she completes the thought, all of lower Manhattan having been conquered by “the hauntingly familiar acrid smells of death and decay [that] waft through an open window” (137). There is nowhere to hide, and nothing to eat. Perhaps, as a reader, your stomach turns at the thought.

Sight

It is one thing to be a master at crafting sight imagery. It is quite another to tackle visual description in a way that seems fresh, innovative, and deserving of the hefty subject that you’re writing about. Three of the most iconic sight images (the sky, the deluge of paper, and the “jumpers” of 9/11) provide the best examples of how sight imagery was employed in prose.
In the essay, “The Sky Was So Blue,” Roberta Allen illustrates the most written-about phenomena of 9/11, as described in the title. It was not surprising, for me, to find out that Allen is a visual artist as well. She writes, “It seemed to me that the sky had never been that blue before… So many people outside on a work day under that incredible sky made it seem like a perverse sort of holiday… How clear the world looked. The sight of that sky, bluer than I had ever seen it” (27). On one hand, it is an insight that is not uncommon in 9/11 literature and journalism. Many, if not most writers commented in retrospect that they, themselves, had thought about the sky and the weather, some even before the attacks happened. To this day, almost a quarter-century later, clear blue skies and temperate conditions in the last days of summer are referred to by many New Yorkers as “9/11 weather.” But what’s fresh about the phrasing is that it is an arbiter of what is to come. It can be read verbatim, yes, but September 11th launched this country into the unknown. On September 10th, there was no foreign war raging, no ramping of hostilities overseas. In retrospect, “How clear the world looked” was putting it mildly. And the people, standing safely outside on a work day, were the lucky ones.

In the very next paragraph, vaulting us into the future, Allen writes:

I had not yet heard from the friend who had seen blood and body parts strewn all over the roof of his high rise. I had not yet seen pictures of people jumping from the upper stories to their deaths, nor seen on TV the woman leaning out the window, alone in the tower, black smoke billowing around her, looking up, behind her, to each side (27).

This is a masterful example of how an essayist of any subject matter can employ visual imagery in an unexpected way. Not only do we have a clear contrast between a sky so blue it summons a deity and black smoke, forcing that lone woman to make a terrible decision, but the writer employs a future that hasn’t happened to her narrator yet, juxtaposing these images in the before and after. As a writer, shifting my narrator into the future is one of my favorite tricks. Despite the terror events that gray Allen’s narrator’s morning and are about to shadow her future, right now, the world is still blue. All is, concurrently, well and unwell on the page.

One additional note here: the writer allows us to have sight images that are simultaneously true and false. The woman is described here as “alone in the tower”—she is, of course, not alone. Perhaps a thousand people remain in that building. But the woman is alone for now, and alone in the camera of the narrator’s eye. The reader is living in two worlds; that is the power of sight imagery, even in creative nonfiction.

This sort of imagery can also move the reader back in time, as Robert Polito, writing “Last Seen,” demonstrates with the use of paper. Describing the “missing” posters that were installed on public spaces all around the city, he writes, “the images on the flyers of the missing were usually in color, and caught the loved one during passages of conspicuous happiness—a wedding, graduation, or party—and attired in celebratory, often formal dress, tuxedo and gowns. Many cradled babies in their arms” (239). What Polito is doing is not dissimilar to Allen; Polito is time traveling, linking sight image to memory, and activating the reader’s body. We see victims of 9/11 not in their last, desperate moments, as in other essays that dare to go there, but at the height of their joy, in the way that their family members and friends wished them to be recognized. The title of the essay, of course, and the prose, include the reference that most posters detailed: where people’s loved ones were last seen. 102nd floor. Aon Corporation. Windows on the World. Places lots of us have never been. But Polito also offers us images we can absolutely see. Tuxedos, weddings… babies. Although there are no olfactory, gustatory or auditory cues here, we might even insert those for ourselves, stopping for a moment to again revisit the sensory moments of our own milestones. We forget, momentarily, that the writer is describing an image printed on paper. Instead, we internalize the image in the body.

But what makes this flash piece stand out, in this genre, is the juxtaposition of imagery completely unrelated to 9/11. The essay starts with images of the narrator’s parents and friends, in the moments immediately preceding their own deaths: “Arthur at my mother’s funeral, an oxygen canister beside him in the aisle of the church” and “my father strapped to the bed…the only other sound the ping of the life support” (238). Here, we have these melancholy images conjuring death (a life support machine, a funeral, an oxygen canister). Polito chooses these as the pictures to stand in for the unbearable fates of those in the towers. He allows those who perished on 9/11 to live on the missing posters “on nearly every wall, store front, telephone booth, lamp pole and tree south of Fourteenth Street.” He allows them the blue sky, and subjects his own circle of family and friends to the metaphorical consequences of black smoke.

Finally, one of the more complicated sight images that writers have attempted to put on the page is that of the falling man. Writers who dared to describe this horrifying phenomenon did so with extreme caution. There is, in fact, something to the idea that they were considering an image both grotesque and an invasion of privacy. Grossman’s essay is a good example of this precarious balance, describing an alternate reality, where those who jumped from the towers made “superhuman leaps from the prone position, launching themselves upwards and backwards into broken windows” (124). Here, again, a contrast: the magic of appearing “superhuman” with the horror of “broken windows.” Grossman later zeroes in on a single jumper. Here, it is important to remember that his essay, “Pitching 9/11” is a hermit crab essay, each section acting as an imaginary film pitch. The jumping man in this section is someone, who is “in agony from the heat and smoke, near death from asphyxiation”... when he “jumps from the 83rd floor” (Grossman 126). The elasticity of the hermit crab form, however, allows the narrator to save him; “instead of falling he hovers in midair, then rockets upward” (126). Again, Grossman endows his subjects with extraordinary characteristics, imagining what could have been. The sight imagery has become speculative.

Sound

And then there is the dilemma of sound. What I heard on September 11th was filtered through a 21-inch television set with questionable speakers. No one, other than those who were there, can tell you what it sounded like when the planes hit, when the people jumped, or when the towers fell. In the special collection, “Tuesday and After” The New Yorker brought together nine New York writers to respond to the day’s events. John Updike wrote, “[the South Tower] fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air.” Here, Updike illuminates the sounds in a very incongruous manner, the idea of a “tinkling shiver” almost light and airy in comparison to the “groan of concussion,” a darker and more violent idea.

Then we circle back to Paul Auster, who wrestles with the idea of sound by juxtaposing sound and silence. He allows us to hear, “the panhandlers with their out-of-tune songs and tales of woe; the fractious harangues of born-again proselytizers” and “the deaf-mutes politely placing sign-language alphabet cards in your lap; the silent men who scuttle through the car, selling umbrellas, table cloths and cheap windup toys” (36). Auster is doing exactly what Updike is doing—invoking sound, or the absence of such, through contrast. Auster’s essay actually ends with the juxtaposition of both sound and sight cues: “the lights go out; the fans stop whirring and everyone sits in silence… Never a word from anyone. Rarely even a sigh. My fellow New Yorkers sit in the dark, waiting with the patience of angels” (36). The sensory imagery of 9/11 in prose is primarily focused on the morning’s events, but here, we stretch a bit, moving underground to a neighborhood and time unspecific. Even still, the hallmarks of 9/11 prose persist: contrast and the simultaneous existence of peace and horror. The illumination of the day in the body. I very distinctly remember the silence on the subways in the days and weeks following the attacks. But you didn’t have to be there. As a reader, you can hear the fans stop, the people surrounding you holding their breath.

Hagedorn, too, plays with the competition of sound and silence. In the 11:15 A.M. section of her essay, she writes, “On our way home, my ten-year-old daughter reveals in a soft voice that she is afraid… We walk home. The persistent wail of sirens is grating and continuous” (135). This is a small moment in an essay packed with sight and olfactory imagery, but it sticks out. That is the duality to 9/11 prose, and in particular to the way that sensory imagery is developed, that persists across the senses.

These sensory images are inherently complex, which reflects the truth that they marked the entry into an increasingly complex world. Far from description alone, they do not merely exist on the page. Here, they trigger memory. They allow the reader to vacillate between past, present, and future. They preserve a moment in time, often by contrast, pointing directly at a dividing line. And they often do these things in orchestration with other elements of a writer’s technique. All of these things are important factors in putting the day’s events into the body of the reader, surrounding them with the senses they use every day, and transporting them back a quarter century.

“Maybe they're just birds, honey.”:
Figurative Language Turned 9/11 into Something Else

As Versluys recognized, “trauma involves an event that cannot be spoken” (89); figurative language, especially in 9/11 literature, allows the writer to confront this barrier. In a 2018 conference paper entitled, “A New Beginning of Trauma Theory in Literature,” Mohd Nazri Latiff Azmi wrote that, “studies that focus on trauma in literature focus a great deal on repetitions that exist within the literary work”—perhaps for the reasons I mentioned above (59). However, Azmi also notes, “traumatic figurative language provides an individual with a way to discuss trauma by using a metaphor, simile, or metonym when discussing it” (59). Although the “individual” that Azmi is talking about is a poet, figurative language is quite often employed in trauma literature. It is a means to an end. By invoking the symbolic, the writer is allowed to sneak in difficult truths through a back or side door.

The trick of figurative language in 9/11 literature is that the craft slips the boundaries of art and somehow tells the actual truth of the matter. One essay that exemplifies this, brilliantly, is Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man,” which occupies an unusual space. It is, I would argue, literary journalism, that seeks not to merely report, but to explore a snapshot, and a moment of collective bewilderment. The falling man (the subject of Richard Drew’s photograph) described in the essay written for Esquire, was captured both upside down and practically parallel to the North Tower, which the man had just fled; Junod describes him as “perfectly vertical.” It is aesthetically beautiful and one of the most horrific and identifiable images in the history of America. (Drew took a series of photos of the same man, but this one is the most well-known.)

Junod’s essay breaks the barriers of journalistic nonfiction. Don DeLillo argued, in his December 2001 Harper’s Magazine essay, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September” that “the event itself” (meaning the entirety of the September 11th attack) “has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile.” And it is understandable why he felt this way. But Junod actually opens with a simile: “In the picture, he departs from this Earth like an arrow.” This particular simile is directional, and lends a lyric air to the essay. It allows the reader to engage with the writer on a higher plane of literary analysis, tipping them off with heightened language to the artistic value of the prose.

Junod immediately contrasts his falling man with the other jumpers, mixing metaphors; he states they appear to be “trying to swim down the side of a mountain.” He evokes these serene images (a body of water to swim through, and a mountain), with another directional cue (“down”), contrasting what the reader knows (or should know) to be a scene filled with horror, panic and ultimately, death.

Junod continues to weave his essay with figurative language. He calls the jumpers “lemminglike” and includes the detail that the titular man was identified by his sister “by his resemblance to an Olympic diver.” He later describes the man’s face as “like that of a medieval Christ.” These particular comparisons seem at odds with one another. The first makes a comparison to a rodent whose filmed behavior looks like mass suicide, invoking the reader’s pity, or disdain. The second allows the reader to imagine the falling man as fully alive, athletic, and in peak form. The last affords the man a literal divine and ancient quality. All three instances, briefly, allow the reader’s attention to wander, a brief excursion from the nature of the article’s harsh realities. Junod even takes us into the mind of the photographer, who is also thinking in figurative language, noting that Richard Drew “photographed the top of the North Tower ‘exploding like a mushroom.’” That’s a particularly graphic and intriguing image; it’s accessible, and unsavory.

Junod deals quite deftly with the more gruesome elements that Americans were unlikely to confront, calling the use of figurative language and subsequent pushback “the resistance to the image.” It is almost as if figurative language here is being used as a renunciation of reality, putting the worst of it on hold. He cites an example: “A mother whispering to her distraught child a consoling lie: “Maybe they're just birds, honey.” Years later, novelist Jess Walter, in The Zero begins his novel with a twist on this metaphor: “They burst into the sky, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angling in ever-tightening circles, toward the ground” (3). He is describing not birds, of course, and not jumpers, but pieces of paper, remnants of thousands of offices. Most of the victims of the World Trade Center worked on the upper floors of the towers, close to one quarter-mile above the Earth. The image of birds in flight, even agitated ones, is apt—almost soothing. It is a milder idea than what actually was. The power of this essay lies in its ability to take figurative language and make it come alive in a moment already so filled with tension and sorrow.

Going back to Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Oskar and his grandparents make for particularly challenging narrators because of their non-traditional communication styles, and the way their words and actions ramble with metaphor. The grandfather has lost the ability to speak altogether; he is so stymied by having survived the bombing of Dresden, and the loss of his fiancée and unborn child, that any communication is an obstacle. His words are unspoken, and thousands of his letters are unsent. The grandmother’s chapters, told through epistolary narrative, are presented as staccato sentences that traverse the page, sometimes at odd tabs. And Oskar, who is all of nine, literally speaks in metaphor. He refers to his state of mind in terms of the heaviness of his boots; “A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don’t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter” (Safran Foer 11); the reader is able to track the burden of grief that Oskar is feeling throughout his journey by the relative heaviness of his boots.

All three of our narrators use figurative language as their sole method of communication. Safran Foer transforms trauma literature, capitalizing on the nature of the terrorist events, and literally putting the consequence (the inability to articulate) into the mouths and minds of his characters. Author Arin Keeble wrote, of the 9/11 novel, “Even before there were such novels, the apparent need for literary interpretations of the attacks reflected just how incomprehensible they felt for many” (Keeble). In this novel, Oskar and his paternal grandparents stand in for those whose trauma was so deep, they could not create a literary response.

Safran Foer’s figurative language does not stop with the way that his narrators speak; he also uses simile to show us how they think and process. Watching the burning towers on TV, Oskar’s grandmother writes:

One million pieces of paper filled up the sky. They stayed there, like a ring around the building. Like the rings of Saturn. The rings of coffee staining my father’s drink. The ring Thomas told me he didn’t
need. (225)

What’s so complicated and layered about this use of figurative language is that the metaphor is wrapped up in the trauma; it is inextricable. Grandma experiences flashbacks that travel across decades. She makes connections between seemingly unrelated events and objects, and the use of the ring metaphor here allows the reader to track her train of thought, if only for a moment. Oskar’s grandmother is in several places at once: in space, staring at a coffee mug, looking at a wedding ring, and watching the Twin Towers engulfed in smoke, taking her only son. The reader is as discombobulated as the character.

One essay that stands out in its mastery of figurative language is “We All Saw It, or The View from Home” written by A.M. Homes. The short, almost speculative creative nonfiction essay documents the events of the day in chronological order. As it dawns on the narrator that what she is watching is, in fact, real, she moves to document what she is seeing on camera. When the film runs out, she writes “by late in the day, I have the sense that my own imagery, my memory, is all too quickly being replaced by the fresh footage” (152). Homes has, at this point, already invoked the imagery of a camera: “When I go to re-wind the film, the camera is empty, the pictures are only in my head” but here now makes a connective metaphor between camera film and her own memory (152). Just as one used to replace, and loop film, the narrator is doing so in her mind.

The collapse of the South Tower is told in simile and metaphor: “It crumbles in less than a minute as though made of sugar cubes. The tower drops from the skyline, a sudden amputation” (152). Yet again, here, the clash of seemingly unlikely and unmatching images. We see the strikingly childlike image of sugar cubes, that one can almost taste (the illusion of the gustatory), pushed up against the violence of an amputation (the illusion of the somatosensory). Homes stays with figurative language, noting of those who have successfully escaped the towers, “People stand on the side lines, offering them water, cell phones, applauding them like marathon runners” (153). This one I find particularly effective (as a runner, I guess), or its subtle celebration of the human instinct to survive.

Finally, the unique use of speculative imagery in this essay filled with figurative language allows the narrator to go inside the planes and towers both—allows the reader to see and be in several devastating places simultaneously: “huddled in the back of a plane”; “in an office [to] catch a half-millisecond glimpse of the plane coming towards you”; “on the ground showered with debris”; and “home waiting for someone to return” (152). In my survey of 9/11 literature, very few authors or narrators actually take the reader inside to this extent; these images, perhaps, and not the sight of the jumpers, are the last taboo of 9/11 literature. Movies and documentaries go to these places. Essays and novels, largely not. (An outlier, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man does so, and daringly mostly from the perspective of a hijacker.)

September 11th prose works so that the reader feels the language in their minds and bodies, reliving the trauma and putting themselves in place and time. Figurative language simultaneously provides an alternative access point to discuss images too difficult for a narrator or reader to process, and it offers the introduction of characters (Oskar and his grandparents, the falling man) who insist on communication through those surrogate means. For an unprecedented, unspeakable event, figurative language is the method through. As the images begin to encroach upon the narrator, as we get to motif, this is a very important point. You may feel what is happening in your body, but you may also have a moment of relief, imagining a bird.

“The voices choking in smoke”: Motif

Motif is the consummate element of 9/11 literature because it encompasses all of the quintessential tools of the genre. Although the examples described here are fiction, they feel true-to-life in ways that are applicable to nonfiction. That’s a combination of describing a large-scale, widely-experienced event, and employing the same specific elements of craft that nonfiction writers did. Having the flexibility of image, the ability to incorporate sensory imagery, and the explosion of repetition, places the reader not just as an observer, but a participant, on alert for the motif as it shows up in different ways. This matters quite a bit, because now the reader is in the driver’s seat, leaning forward. Now they are truly surrounded.

Here, we turn to Falling Man; not the Junod 2003 essay of similar name, but Don DeLillo’s novel, published in 2007. The novel’s protagonist, Keith, works in the towers, and, in the opening scene of the book, is fleeing uptown. But even before we meet Keith, we meet the smoke, the motif that saturates this novel. DeLillo introduces us to the world that Keith walks out into: “Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, bursting around corners, seismic tides of smoke…” (3). (The metaphor here, giving the smoke an ocean-like quality, only enhances its impact and grandeur.) As he tries to escape to safety, Keith watches as “a shirt came down out of the high smoke” (4). When his estranged wife, Lianne, describes his sudden appearance at her doorstep, he arrives “like smoke, standing there” (8). And when Keith describes his escape to Lianne, framed by the journey of his taxi driver, he says, “He thought one tower was blocking his view of the other tower, or the smoke was. He saw the smoke” (21).

One way that DeLillo uses the smoke motif is as an amplification of how other writers use repetition; to elicit a traumatic response. When Keith finally makes it to a hospital for treatment, having had fragments of glass blown into his face during the attacks, he is administered anesthesia; the first thing he “sees” is his friend, Rumsey, who had died in the North Tower: “...but there was Rumsey in his chair by the window, which meant the memory was not suppressed or the substance hadn’t taken effect yet, a dream, a waking image, whatever it was, Rumsey in the smoke, things coming down” (22). Keith is forced to immediately re-live watching his friend die—a traumatic response, with smoke as the uninvited perpetrator.

Later, when describing Keith’s physical therapy, DeLillo writes, “His injury was slight but it wasn’t the torn cartilage that was the subject of this effort. It was the chaos, the levitation of ceilings and floors, the voices choking in smoke” (40). Keith is unable to disassociate the smoke from the loss of his friend, and unable to examine the trauma without re-experiencing it. Ash, fire, and a falling man all feature prominently throughout the novel (including the title, of course), but everywhere Keith goes, the smoke follows, reinhabiting his body, and reminding him of what he is still running from.

The hallmark of a motif is that it has the capacity to change and expand; unlike repetition, it doesn’t always look the same when you encounter it, although the impact may be similar. When Keith visits another survivor, Florence, to return her briefcase, which he had accidentally absconded with during the attacks, they speak specifically about the smoke, including an extended section about Florence’s escape: “They were moving out of the worst of the smoke now and this is when she saw the dog, a blind man and a guide dog” (57). As she shares this, Keith walks over to Florence’s briefcase, and pulls out her cigarettes. Florence says, “In the smoke all I could see was those stripes on the fireman’s coats” (58); in response, Keith lights one of her cigarettes, and puts it in his mouth. The back and forth of the smoke from the tower and the smoke from the cigarette is a quintessential instance of motif, and a powerful way to impact the reader, almost acting as a call and response.

Smoke, as a mixture of gasses, has a way of infecting all it comes into contact with—it is omnipresent. And throughout this novel, DeLillo lets his motif become so prevalent, it is inescapable, to the reader or the characters. When Florence takes a drag of her cigarette, Keith says, “...blow some my way” (58). Keith, having escaped one version of smoke, is asking to be enveloped in another. When Keith comes back, later on in the novel, to visit his fellow survivor, “the windows were open so Florence could smoke” (88). There is less tension here, and now it is not just desired, but a fact of life. Smoke, which can now be let out of the apartment, exists in the background.

These different and evolving forms of smoke become an important conduit for telling Keith’s story. As he reimagines the poker games he’d previously hosted, which included the late Rumsey and other friends lost in the attacks, Keith recalls, “Cigarettes were not prohibited. There was one cigarette smoker and he was allowed to smoke all the cigarettes he wanted if he didn’t mind appearing helpless and defective. Most of the others smoked cigars and felt expensive” (99). This instance is particularly enlightening, as the reader is clued into the value system of Keith and his circle, through their chosen method of inhaling tobacco. Of ingesting smoke.

Keith and Florence continue to visit, ultimately engaging in an affair—“the deep shared self, down through the smoke” (157). In this last example, it’s even ambiguous which smoke Keith is imagining—from the towers or her cigarettes. Further, when Keith envisions telling his wife about the affair, he believes, “She would say she could understand the intensity of the involvement, in view of the completely uncommon nature of its origin, in smoke and fire” (161). His relationship with Florence, and increasingly the world, is inextricable from the motif, having been born there.

Even in the late scenes of the novel, where Keith has traveled to a casino thousands of miles from home, he is “enclosed by the dimness and low ceilings and the thick residue of smoke that adhered to his skin and carried decades of crowds and action” (188). Versluys writes, “In Falling Man, trauma is not healed; it spreads like a contagious disease. No aspect of life remains untouched by melancholia” (30). Looking at how motif is used liberally throughout Falling Man, I believe you can even replace the word melancholia in this sentence with smoke. In the real world, one of the things I discovered working at Ground Zero is that anything that I wore that day had to be thrown out. The smoke was all-powerful, clinging to my clothes beyond anything that detergent could remove. You cannot remove smoke from Falling Man without crumbling its structure, use of metaphor, characters, and plot—at least, no more than I could get the smell out of my clothes.

I include these numerous examples because I think they are demonstrative of how an effective motif is employed. The motif stretches the length of the work. It encompasses more than one form, evolving along the way. This particular one involves an extraordinarily sensory image. Smoke can be felt, seen, smelled, even tasted. Although the motif is primarily involved with the main character, there are other instances of characters smoking, arguing about smoke, or fleeing it. In this particular novel, the events of 9/11 are often revisited, and, as Versluys notes, “the endless reenactment of trauma presented in Falling Man allows for no accommodation or resolution” (20). Like smoke itself, the motif and its traumatic effect on Falling Man are impossible to escape from. It shows up in ways both predictable and unexpected.

As mentioned earlier, Walter’s The Zero begins with an image that simultaneously acts as metaphor and our first introduction to the novel’s motif:

They burst into the sky, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angling in ever tightening circles, toward the ground, drifting close enough to touch, and then close enough to see that it wasn’t a flock of birds at all—it was paper. Burning scraps of paper. All the little birds were paper. Fluttering and circling and growing bigger, falling bits and frantic sheets, some smoking, corners scorched, flaring in the open air until there was nothing left but a fine black edge… and then gone, a hole and nothing but the faint memory of smoke. Behind the burning flock came a great wail and moan as seething black unfurled, the world inside out, birds beating against a rolling sky and in that moment everything that wasn’t smoke was paper. (3)

Walter’s choice to inundate his story with paper is both familiar to our study of motif (being an already commonly associated-with-9/11 image), and quite different from Falling Man’s smoke, in the way it’s employed. The Zero, too, tells the story of a 9/11 survivor—this one a police officer, Brian Remy. In the opening scene of the novel, it is a short time later, and Remy is taking a gun to his own skull; because of the implied brain injury incurred, the story operates in such a way that Remy’s narration is constantly being interrupted. Scenes are regularly stopped mid-sentence, and Remy’s memories are displaced and disappear.

Throughout the novel, paper plays an important role, in both the plot itself and as setting. In the gun sequence, Remy’s neighbor comes to check on him, after hearing a shot go off. After a short conversation about the state of the world, the scene continues:

“Your friend said things will be better when all the paper has been cleaned up.”
“My friend?” Remy asked.
“The young man who was here looking for you this morning. The paper guy.”
“Paper guy?” Remy asked. (7)

And, as in Falling Man, we are off to the races. The Zero is a noir-style novel with an opaque quality to it; shadowy figures, mysterious identities. The reader is never on sure footing. But it grounds itself in the motif of paper, as if it were being filmed cinematically.

Paper, of course, is an unforgettable image from September 11th, in two main forms. The World Trade Center was filled with it, and upon the towers’ destruction, documents of all kinds filled the skies, the rivers, and the rooftops of other boroughs. Additionally, in the weeks that followed 9/11, the city was plastered with handmade and printed posters—papers bearing the faces, names, features, and, as discussed, last known whereabouts of the thousands of people who remained missing. Paper was everywhere, and so it fits seamlessly as a motif, given the flexibility of the image, the proliferation of use, and the way that we see it employed in post-9/11 prose. It’s a sight image (for now), but when combined with repetition, it overwhelms.

And Jess Walter can’t get enough of it. One of the first things that we see Remy do is visit the wreckage site, which he and the other first responders call “the Zero.” He wonders what the Zero is made of:

And paper. What percentage paper? Much of the paper had made a dramatic escape; that’s what Remy recalled, watching the paper flushed into space, a flock of birds hovering over everything and then leafing down on the city. That would help, somehow, knowing what percentage of the pile was paper… But the people were different. And the paper. The people and the paper burned up or flew away or ran off, and after it happened, they were considerably less than they had been in the beginning; they were bellowed and blown, and they scattered like seeded dandelions in a windstorm (19).

Here, too, in this passage, Walter is demonstrating to the reader the volume of paper; the way that it occupied our landscape. And, in this short passage, we read seven instances of the word. As a motif, the idea of paper is striking, because this, too, like the smoke in Falling Man, was impossible to escape. It is, to Remy, wound up in the steel and the people at the bottom of the indescribable pile. And it follows our main character around the city.

While walking in the West Village, Remy is confronted with a wall of posters, plastered against the window of Famous Ray’s Pizza. The passage goes on for the good part of three pages. The author, again, goes to great lengths to tell us how Remy is not confronting one piece of paper, but infinite sheaths:

They sprouted up in parks and at hospitals, on schools and on subway platforms – anywhere people could think to tape up pictures. And as soon as one photo went up, people rushed from their apartments and houses to fill the entire wall with pictures. There could be no single photograph of the missing; every wall had to be covered, every space filled. (72)

This is both motif and sight image working together, winking at one another. The reader's eyes can imagine what this might look like. We are overwhelmed by the image, and simultaneously told that it is overwhelming. There is no space unoccupied by paper.
These examples represent images and ideas that you would expect to show up in a novel about 9/11—especially if you lived through it in New York. But then Walter goes beyond the expected, and throws Remy in an airplane hangar full of paper. Remy finds himself in a hangar “full of people, filing cabinets, and tables of burned and dirty paper… As far as Remy could see, these tables were covered with paper—notes, forms, resignations, and retributions, as if the whole world could be conjured out of the paper it had produced” (97). We are again not only inundated by the motif, but our main character is as well. (This scene is based on real events. A hangar at JFK airport was used for a decade and a half to house the artifacts of the Twin Towers.)

While these documents, ostensibly taken from “the Zero” eventually provide Remy with clues to the people he’s seeking, what is of interest to the motif, as it develops and changes, is that the papers are almost always characterized as burned or unburned. Beyond their worth, they are given weight and texture. The motif dips back into the sensory here. The reader can imagine touching them. (Ah, the missing sense.) Walter employs this motif in a way that 9/11 prose tends to do—it floods the reader with repetition and instance, hitting us over the head, begging the reader to pay attention. Begging us to see it with our own eyes. But here, in the hangar, we are faced with confronting paper in a manner that doesn’t automatically come to mind. Few people knew this place existed. And we are forced to face evidence that, while they may not have been a part of our memories, were certainly a part of someone’s.

The further the novel progresses, the more the paper (literally) stacks up against Remy. His boss gives him a dossier, in a paper folder, to carry around, and to always have on his body. Remy becomes obsessed with document recovery, and the different conditions (burned, unburned, stacked, loose) that the documents can take. He even, as he begins to remember his actual whereabouts on September 11th, is ultimately triggered by the motif:

Remy did remember something from that day. Paper. He remembered smoke and he remembered standing alone while a billion sheets of paper fluttered to the ground. Like notes without bottles on the ocean, a billion pleas and wishes sent out on the world. He remembered walking beneath the long shadows and watching the paper fall as a grumble rose beneath his feet and — (306).

In this last passage, even as the continuity is taken away by Remy’s inability to concentrate, Walter not only brings us back to the thematic heart of The Zero, but shines a light on its importance in Remy’s journey, and his hope for any recovery. The use of simile (“like notes without bottles on the ocean”) and auditory image (“a grumble rose”) push the motif further, giving it deeper dimension.

Finally, there are also some neat nods to the motif in other forms, including further metaphor. Later in the novel, when Remy visits a doctor, the doctor suggests, “But please, do yourself a favor and take a train or a bus back to New York. Your eyes are as fragile as origami, Mr. Remy” (Walter 267). Here, in a scene completely unconnected to the motif, the paper (folded this time!) steers us right back. As we exit the novel, in one of the concluding sequences, Remy is described as “airborne, free, light… like paper, tossed and blown with the other falling bits and frantic sheets” (323). Through metaphor, Remy has become the motif.

Conclusion

It is menacing, for the body to experience trauma derived from the page. But if anything can attempt to reproduce what was felt that day by billions of people, it is, I’d argue, of chief importance. Having recently commemorated the 23rd anniversary of the attacks, there is not one plane that flies over Manhattan that my body does not unconsciously assign malice to; there is not one sunny sky my eyes don’t measure against that impossible blue, stretching back two and a half decades. And while it is never very far from my thoughts, I recognize that there are billions of people alive today (including nine of my nieces and nephews) who weren’t born yet on September 11, 2001, and many more (including my eldest niece, who was not yet four) who are too young to have a meaningful memory. This genre of literature is specifically aimed at never letting us forget—not just what happened, but what it was like to be there. It is, I believe, supposed to be an immersive experience.

Trauma literature did not begin with 9/11, but neither did it end there. It passed through and looks different on the other side. That the writers of this prose so closely duplicated the exhaustion, agony, bewilderment and grief of that moment in history, through repetition, is astonishing, and pushed forward the development of trauma literature through a ferocious dedication to replicating reality. Through the flooding of the page, either with a single image, or in concert with others, the writers allow the reader to come close to the numbness so many of us felt, watching an endless loop on TV. Speed and magnification of image enhance that repetition, advancing or delaying the flashback as the writer sees fit.

The literature of September 11th has invited all sorts of ethical concerns. Whose deaths do we document, and how? What is the worth of a human being? How do we understand the motives of modern violence, and should we even bother? How can two writers look at the American flag, share the same dreams, with radically different interpretations and outcomes? These are all real concerns sparked by many of the essays and novels described here, as well as many others left out for brevity’s sake. But that is how American literature matures: through experience, experiment, and thorough interrogation. Inviting ourselves to relive the day, through these elements of craft, is our first gambit at that.

I mentioned that A.M. Homes is one of the very few authors or narrators that took the reader inside the intimate horrors of 9/11, even though it was speculative. But the first to do so was probably Ian McEwan, in “Beyond belief,” that essay that was published 25 hours after the fall of the North Tower. The man who said he saw no death. McEwan wrote, “we were left to imagine for ourselves the human terror inside the airliner, down the corridors and elevator lobbies of the stricken buildings, or in the streets below as the towers collapsed on to [sic] rescue workers and morning crowds” (“Beyond belief). So, the genre of 9/11 prose actually began where few dared ever take it back. For many other writers who would follow, it has been enough to document, to witness, and to create an area of literature that would allow others to bear witness alongside them.

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Amy Cook was a 2024 finalist for Tablet Magazine’s inaugural First Personal Essay Contest. Kenyon Review Writers Workshop (CNF, 2021). Her essays and poems have been featured in more than two dozen literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including Anti-Heroin Chic and the Los Angeles Review. She is an Editorial Assistant for the literary magazine, CRAFT. Rainier Writing Workshop (MFA pending, 2025).

Amy is an award-winning lyricist (BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, 2008 Harrington Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement) whose work has been heard at Broadway’s Minskoff Theatre (Easter Bonnet Competition, 2010), the Metropolitan Room and the Algonquin Salon. Her lyrics were most recently performed by the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus.

Ioanna Opidee
"Essaying Tragedy"
Assay 2.1 (Fall 2015)

Megan Baxter
"On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11
Assay 7.2 (Spring 2021)

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