9/11 Trauma and Visual Witnessing in Helen Schulman's A Day at the Beach

Abstract

Helen Schulman's A Day at the Beach, a rarely discussed post-9/11 novel, scrutinizes the ways in which visual engagements with the attacks deepen the sense of self-scrutiny and renewal triggered by the terrorist event on an individual and national level alike. Placing Schulman's text in the tradition of Paula Fox's work on the domestic manifestations of social and political trauma, this essay examines Schulman's attempt to juxtapose vicarious media witnessing (through television) on the one hand and unmediated experience on the other, a distinction that complicates the mandate for self-scrutiny and change articulated by the attacks. Unlike many other writers who have singled out iconic images of World Trade Center jumpers without differentiating among their forms of transmission or probing their entwinement with the posttraumatic dynamics of television aesthetics, Schulman interrogates the concrete, transformative effect of the televised image and the catalytic function of vicarious trauma, highlighting instead a form of resistant mourning as the refusal of resolution, closure, or radical change—both in narrative terms and in the realm of politics.