Novelists and 9/11

Once the immediate shock and fear of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, subsided into wary anxiety, it became clear that what that day demanded, above all, was interpretation. Only if we knew what September 11 meant — to its perpetrators, to its immediate victims, and to the nation that was its ultimate, intended victim — could we know how to respond, both individually and collectively. This instability of meaning is what made the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center different from the earlier national tragedies to which it was compared — for instance, the attack on Pearl Harbor. December 7, 1941, was immediately legible: It was an act of war by one state against another, and there was no doubt about what would follow. September 11 was, and to a large degree remains, a coded and symbolic declaration, whose meaning and implications vary widely from one observer to the next.
The loudest interpreters of the attacks, as usual, were politicians and pundits. But there is something truly impressive about the way novelists have insisted on their own right to confront and explain history. For two generations, at least, we have been told that novelists are relics, mere craftsmen of narrative in an age of mass production. The novel was doomed to go the way of poetry, a semiprecious hobby unplugged from the live wires of the culture. Yet during the last five and a half years, almost all of our best novelists have written books explicitly or implicitly about September 11 — some good, some bad, but all unflinching in the face of the largest, most urgent questions. And as history teaches, it is the novelists' interpretations of our moment that will testify on our behalf to posterity, long after the official explanations have gone brittle.
So far we have had post-September 11 novels from John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and more. But the writer who seemed best equipped to respond to our paranoid moment, whose September 11 novel seemed most necessary, was Don DeLillo. Mr. DeLillo, more than any other novelist, has always worked at the intersection of public terror and private fear. His novels explore the way disaster, mediated through television, becomes experience: the Kennedy assassination in "Libra," the "airborne toxic event" in "White Noise," the atom bomb in "Underworld."
Mr. DeLillo has even envisioned the writer and the terrorist as direct rivals, each seeking the power to change history by changing the way it is understood. As he told an interviewer in 1985, "There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to." This insight, which once might have seemed paradoxical or frivolous, now looks like a simple statement of fact. Terror, we have learned during the last five years, regards individual bodies as a medium through which to affect the collective imagination. That is why the terrorist can so savagely disregard his victims' suffering, and why resistance to terrorism is always also an affirmation of humanism.
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