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from PART 3 - CULTURE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
For the literary scholar, one of the most revealing things abut 9/11 was the great public interest afterwards in what writers would have to say: how could the writer respond to such a catastrophic event, an event that seemed so cinematic that, according to Kathryn Flett in The Observer, it ‘mocked all power of description?’ Yet there seemed an overriding need for words in the wake of 9/11. As Ulrich Baer has pointed out:
In the first days after the attack, the astounding efforts by the rescue workers found a symbolic echo in the poems postered on walls and fences: first in makeshift memorials, then delivered to inboxes all over the globe. This spontaneous burgeoning of poetry responded to a need – a need for words that then took the form of written scrolls hung on fences and walls along with donated pens and markers, allowing anyone to offer the language of poetry where little could be said.
Responding to this public desire for words of explanation or elucidation, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks the weekend supplements were flooded with confessions of diminished power from authors across the globe. Jay McInerney, Arundhathi Roy, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan all wrote of their sense of the futility of the act of writing, the inconsequential nature of the writer and the inability of language to encapsulate or represent the reverberations of the attacks.
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