Forever-After-Images: the Visual Language of 9/11

The American novel of the moment seems to be Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, praised in some quarters as the first great fictional work on 9/11. Last February, Anthony Cummins’ thought-provoking post at the Guardian Unlimited’s A&E blog asked “Does literature sell 9/11 short?” and he pretty much answered in the affirmative after briefly examining eight novels; through a fluke of timing he does not mention DeLillo’s book, which was published last month. I’d be very curious to see what Cummins makes of it, and how it would affect his conclusion. I haven’t picked up the book yet, and for the most part I managed to avoid reviews and excerpts: I want my read to be as fresh as possible, to be completely open to whatever unique take DeLillo has on that day. Unfortunately, all it took was a glimpse of Ji Lee’s enigmatic illustration (above, left) on the front page of last week’s New York Times Book Review to pull me far enough into Frank Rich’s review to read:

“In his new novel, Don DeLillo shoves us back into the day itself in his first sentence: ‘It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.’ He resurrects that world as it was, bottling the mortal dread, high anxiety and mass confusion that seem so distant now.”

As insightful as Frank Rich usually is, I couldn’t disagree more. It reads like the first sentence of a novel, yes, maybe even of a very good novel, but the sheer awful immediacy of that day allowed for no metaphor, no reflection, and so I find the passage somehow flat and distant. But by contrast I couldn't take my eyes off the illustration: the antiseptic vertical bands— an instant visual shorthand for the exterior of the Twin Towers— juxtaposed with the ominous smudge (a scorch mark perhaps, but more likely a suggestion of the infamously banned photo of the “falling man” of the novel’s title)——a disturbing and familiar after-image of calamity. Before I even read the title of the review I read the picture, which “shoved” me “back into the day itself” more surely than De Lillo’s first sentence ever could.

9/11 was the first event to traumatize the world in real time. As David Friend writes in his excellent Watching the World Change— The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11: “... we were one world taking in the same scene and connected by the same horrifying picture story.” For many New Yorkers, there was nothing between them and incomprehensible horror but a few cubic miles of clear autumn air; for the rest of the world there was only the few added minutes it took for the electrons to dash to their screens and monitors. In the digital age, it is the capacity to capture and transmit the most fleeting visual impression that is driving us as a civilization to a post-literate state. We are amassing a backlog of iconic visual cues around momentous events (the Towers, the toppling of Hussein’s statue, the hooded figure of Abu Ghraib, hostages in orange jumpsuits, etc.) even as we struggle to form the right words in reaction; what’s more, this new visual lexicon is revising the past even as it frames the future.

The World Trade Center was a cultural icon and touchstone long before 9/11, but no one suspected we were looking into the future whenever we contemplated it. An image of the intact towers now seems like a time-lapse photo of their collapse, minus the clouds of dust and smoke. They were pure verticality, their form and destruction forever now inseparable in the collective memory in a perversion of the original modernist dictum “form follows function.” Again, a perfect collective after-image, allowing for complex visuals puns like that in Milan Bozic’s cover design(above, right) for Ken Kalfus’ novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (which did receive mention in Cummins’ blog post). Here, twin sticks of dynamite with lit fuses against a deep blue background stand for a marriage in bitter dissolution against the backdrop of 9/11 and its ongoing global aftermath of war and more terrorism. The cover design is bold yet low-key and disarmingly simple, appropriate enough for a black comedy which doesn't seek to reclaim the terrible day itself—— but to examine those dark places in our selves where the after-images still flicker.