Lynn Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall: Responding to the Media Spectacle

"When all is said, what remains to be said is the disaster. Ruin of words, demise writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without re-mains (the fragmentary)."

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

The attacks of 9/11 exist in the minds of most people in its media portrayal. The media covered the tragedy for days in an endless cycle of horrific footage, headlines, and commentary that varied little from one network to another, or even from the words of government officials. From those in New York City to many around the world, people watched and listened and allowed the media to fill the empty space left by the absence of the towers.¹ It was definitively a spectacle that set in motion a single discourse about the event and closed off dissenting voices. The momentum of the chorus of news anchors unified thought through the uncommon cohesion of narratives and lack of debate. Journalists set aside neutrality in favor of identifying with the public that felt threatened and victimized.² It effectively cut off any effort at critical engagement in favor of a unified voice that created a single public discourse for individuals to adopt unchallenged. As a result, Douglas Kellner believes "the images and discourses of the corporate media failed to provide a coherent account of what happened, why it happened, and what would count as intelligent and responsible responses" to 9/11 (29). The media effectively cut off ethical engagement by cutting off response and filling the discourse with endless words that all amounted to the same thing.³ The spectacle of terrorism requires such a media perpetuation and unity of voice to function, and the corporate media provided it. It was as if the media was doing the terrorists' job for them, perpetuating a single vision of what America's response should be and foreclosing the subject with definitive language that disallowed interpretation.⁴

Couple the definitive language with the repetition of images, mostly shown in fragments, and new, confusing formats to news shows, and the media aesthetic functions as a mechanism of foreclosure in the post-9/11 environment. It capitalizes on shock and fear, the way terror reinstitutes itself in the media, to capture an audience that is confused and without a language to define what has occurred. The dramatic footage draws the gaze and imposes a single vision upon it. Kelly Oliver defines the situation as "trauma as spectacle," images that resist interpretation, "inciting the unthinking repetition of violence" (161). The images offer a glimpse of the reality on the ground in any situation, but if they are not contextualized and engaged, then they have little true meaning. Furthermore, the increasingly confusing format of the news with more and more information being offered simultaneously adds to the ability of powerful voices to frame the situation in a definitive manner. The event depicted thus takes on the meaning of whoever has the loudest mouthpiece, picked up by the most media outlets, and plays into the already existing sentiments that surround a traumatic event.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall confronts the media blitz that occurred in the days directly following the terrorist attacks. Characters routinely find themselves "in front of the TV. Watching the thing happen over and over" (49). The media is portrayed as ubiquitous, repetitive, and impossible to escape as the infotainment⁵ genre takes hold of its audience. Even "in a coffee shop on the boardwalk the TV was on, no escape even at the edge of the sea" (172). The seductive images become more and more real in their repetition and people confuse reality with the media representation. Renata, the novel's protagonist, falls prey to the media "fantasies, she didn't see [9/11] happen, although she's seen it so many times since that it feels like she saw it" (45). The footage substitutes for her experience in that it shapes reality and ultimately becomes her perception of reality. She too is drawn in by the bright colors and music in which the news is...