Art Imitating Life? Visual Turns in 9/11 Novels

Abstract

If images of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the subsequent engulfment of lower Manhattan in soot and debris have come to signify 9/11 in the popular imaginary, so, too, have they become a trope in many 9/11 novels. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) employ this trope by positioning their protagonists, mostly in crucial moments in their character developments, within eyeshot of the World Trade Center. While the character developments take on different directions from there, the individual descriptions of the attacks on the Twin Towers all offer similar impressions; so similar in fact, that readers might feel that they are now reading, in a fictional context, the very images that they themselves witnessed, either in person or mediated through global media. Such passages invite the reader to remember, rather than to imagine, the extent to which the collapse of the Twin Towers signifies the deep rupture in the social grain of American culture that 9/11 has come to constitute. Employing different modes of visualization, Messud’s, McInerney’s, and DeLillo’s novels exemplify to which degree descriptive passages can mediate simultaneity, metaphoricity, and performance, respectively. These visual turns add a new perspective to discussions about the fictional mediation of 9/11 in contemporary literature