Allegories of Falling and the 9/11 Novel

In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.

Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

[T]here is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity; so that whether the misfortune is before our eyes, or whether they are turned back to it in history, it always touches with delight. This is not an unmixed delight, but blended with no small uneasiness. The delight we have in such things, hinders us from shunning scenes of misery; and the pain we feel prompts us to relieve ourselves in relieving those who suffer; and all this is antecedent to any reasoning.

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry

Much as for Walter Benjamin allegory is especially suited to registering the world in ruins and fragments, 9/11 novels have widely employed allegory to confront the literal as well as figural debris of 9/11. If a distinctive feature coheres the burgeoning genre of the 9/11 novel, it is a reliance on self-conscious political allegory to grapple with the perception of historical rupture and decay induced by 9/11. While often biting in their satire, however, the collection of early novelistic responses that this essay contemplates generally enlists allegory to contain and manage the ambivalent afterlives of 9/11, marshaling overridingly conservative reactions to the event. Almost unanimously rendering 9/11 as a crucible in middle-aged masculinity, these narratives probe the American predicament through recurrent plot devices and motifs that both capture the domestic in jeopardy and indict narcissistic American self-reference. Yet, while external forces besiege these novels’ protagonists, their trials are in part engendered by delayed adolescence and near suicidal behaviors. Thus, persistently haunted by the “falling men” of the World Trade Center suicides, the 9/11 novel employs the trope of suicide to scrutinize American complicity, to underscore the slippages between art and terror, and paradoxically to query the status of postmodernism in the wake of what might be deemed the quintessential postmodern event. These “allegories of falling” consequently invite interpretation vis-à-vis the analytic of the sublime, insofar as they collapse the trauma of 9/11 into the psychic economy of the spectacle, with the ultimate effect of subduing 9/11’s fraught sociopolitical meanings.

Above all, the metaphor of the male mid-life crisis indexes American ineptitude, or the disavowed truth of late imperial impotence and failure. But if this embattlement of conventional masculinity and spent heroism plotted within the genre forebodes the waning of American fiscal, military, and geopolitical dominance, it elicits contradictory impulses from its characters.¹ Most immediately, such anxiety is displaced into a perceived menace to paternity (equating fatherhood with patria or homeland) and corresponding onus to secure the threatened patrilineal bequest, thus figuring the sanctity of the father–son bond as the essence of what 9/11 jeopardized.

Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (2004), a narrative that begins at 8:30 a.m. on 9/11 and concludes as the North Tower collapses, centers on a father and two sons trapped in that restaurant. Each “chapter” being allocated to a single minute with the effect of dilating the morning’s temporal duration, the narrative begins as the father correlates their circumstances with those of American hegemony: “That morning, we were at the top of the world, and I was the center of the universe” (3). Much as Beigbeder’s protagonist is alienated from his sons by a recent divorce, the newly divorced Brian Remy of Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006) is similarly penalized by his son when he pretends that Remy has died in the World Trade Center, a conceit he first performs in a school talent show and then exorcizes by joining the military. The child narrator Oskar of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud...