Editor's Column

September 11, 2001, and Narrative Understanding

"On September 11, 2001, the world changed." In the three months between September 11 and the day I am writing this column, I have heard this claim so frequently that it seems, within the United States at least, to have achieved the status of a universally acknowledged truth. Indeed, if the reiteration continues apace, by the time this column appears the claim will have become a simple commonplace that we utter with little thought, much as we do a phrase such as "tomorrow is another day." Before that happens, I want to reflect briefly on the claim because it seems to me to invite a narrative analysis of September 11 and its aftermath, an analysis that can offer different insights from those proposed by the countless political analyses I have heard in the past three months. (Of course, just as many of those analyses include a narrative dimension, this one includes a political dimension.) "On September 11, 2001, the world changed" is not only a compressed narrative but also one with notable implications about the crucial role of narrative in our efforts to make sense of the world.

These implications start with the concept of event, as we can see by filling out the claim: "On September 11, 2001, the world changed because something happened at the site of the World Trade Center in New York, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and in the sky over Pennsylvania. Before that something, we lived in one kind of world; after that something, we live in another kind of world." Events are a sine qua non of narrative and are the foundation of the explanation a narrative offers—and, thus, of a plot. But just as plot is only one element of narrative, a foundation does not equal an explanation, as further attention to the implications of the claim about September 11indicates. The events and their literal consequences—the huge loss of innocent life, the deep grief of survivors, the massive destruction of property, and more—were (and remain) horrifying. These events devastated the lives of thousands of people beyond the point to which any political or narrative analysis will ever do justice; they "shocked," "shook," and "stunned" the world. But to claim that these events changed the entire world is to imply that their significance extends beyond these literal, horrific consequences to some larger, even more pervasive effect.

That effect, I would suggest, is one about our narrative understanding of the world: "On September 11, 2001, what happened at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in the sky over Pennsylvania changed the existing narrative by which we make sense of the world." Before September 11, 2001, we had somewhere in our consciousnesses an implicit and relatively stable understanding about the past, present, and future of the world. On the morning of September 11, that understanding was destroyed. Since then we have been trying to replace it with another relatively stable understanding. Although there is no lack of candidates for the new narrative—the spectrum ranges from "the species Homo sapiens is irrevocably on the path to self-destruction" to "the world has only temporarily gone off course"—we currently have no consensus about any of them, no confidence that any adequately explains where we are now and where we are likely to be going next. One small sign of this missing consensus: I am acutely aware that what I write in December 2001 may be terribly out-of-date by May 2002. Perhaps events in the interval will have led us to understand September 11 as the beginning of the end for terrorist activity in our lifetimes; or perhaps events will have led us to regard September 11 as the beginning of World War III. Training in narratology is a far cry from training in futurology, but it does suggest why futurology has now become an impossible enterprise.

Understanding the "world changed" as implying that "the narrative by which we made sense of the world changed" provides a way...