Two events that happened in a span of six decades forged the contours of the role of the United States of America vis-à-vis the rest of the world: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In what has come to be viewed as an ill-conceived move, Japan launched a surprise military strike against the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941—prompting the then American President Franklin D Roosevelt to call it “a date which will live in infamy.” However, if there is a date that is destined to live in infamy, it is 9/11.

9/11 is the moniker given to the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, with the collapse of the WTC having come to visually represent the enormity of the incidents. Two planes hijacked and piloted by a few terrorists were crashed into the WTC buildings in New York on that fateful day, bringing down the twin towers, which left in its wake 2,752 people killed and thousands injured. 9/11, since then, has emerged as a reference point in history as well as literature for the dastardly attacks. Besides the despicability of the act, what added a surreal touch to the incident was the repeated reminder of the collapse of the towering edifices through video streaming on televisions across the world, making the tragedy a universal obsessive-compulsive spectacle.

In his dialogue with Giovanna Borradori (Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida), Jürgen Habermas, German sociologist and philosopher, considers 9/11 “the first historic world event in the strictest sense” that took place in front of the “universal eyewitness” of a global public due to extraordinary media coverage. Jacques Derrida, French critic and philosopher, in the same book, while calling 9/11 an event that is actually “conditioned [and] circulated . . . through the media by the means of a prodigious techno-socio-political machine,” does concede that “this very thing, the place and meaning of this ‘event,’ remains ineffable.”

Derrida calls 9/11 an “incantation” repeated continuously, whereby metonymy substitutes a date for the traumatic attacks. To Derrida, this sort of compulsive repetition of the metonymy serves two purposes: of deadening the senses and thus conjuring the fear away, and of denying “our powerlessness to name the item.”

It is pertinent to ask here whether the labeling of the attacks as ‘9/11’ has served in anyway to neutralize the fear that it could happen again. Or, is 9/11 just a shorthand for a disastrous event, something that is enforced into common parlance by the discourse of the media? At another level, one might even ask whether 9/11 as metonymy and the compulsive viewing of the streaming video feeds had any Aristotelian cathartic value. Did the pity (eleos) and fear (phobos) that the graphic (spoudaios) television images (mimesis) evoked effect any proper purgation (catharsis) of such emotions? Whatever. 9/11 remains an indelible imprint on the collective consciousness of the world—a date that is doomed to “live in infamy.”

The artistic and cultural responses to 9/11 have in their own way helped people come to terms with the ‘event’ and its aftermath, spawning, in the process, a whole new genre. Is 9/11 literature then just a literary reaction to the trauma associated with the event? In the first paper, “From the Uncanny to the Sublime: 9/11 and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man,” Pramod K Nayar provides the answer to that question. Arguing that to see DeLillo’s Falling Man as a mere literary expression of trauma is inadequate, Nayar shows how using the ‘uncanny’ and then shading it into a ‘sublime’ of the traumatic experience of 9/11, DeLillo provides a cultural and social framework to see and make sense of 9/11.

Paranoia—of the post-9/11 kind—is one of the primary triggers of racism. To be paranoid is to be irrationally distrustful of a man because of his physical attributes, his place of origin, language, and beliefs. Paranoia has characterized, since the colonial era, the average white American’s prejudice against the different ethnic groups on the American soil. In the second paper, “‘The Dirty Jap’: The Trial of Prejudice in David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars,” Archana V elucidates how Guterson uses the case of Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese American falsely accused of murdering a white American, to expose the racist undercurrents, both open and institutionalized, in the American society.

Though not to the same degree, William Faulkner too grappled with themes related to racism. In his Go Down, Moses, Faulkner does talk of the exploiting classes that descended from landless whites and of lands cursed by slavery, and expresses, through the characterization of Ike McCaslin, his hope that the end of exploitation of one race by another is possible through a change of heart and emotional acceptance. In the third paper, “Ike McCaslin and the Measure of Heroism,” Vikrant Sehgal shows how a proper understanding of Ike McCaslin’s life is essential to understanding Faulkner’s measure of heroism that lies in one’s capacity to grieve and expiate.

Talking of racism, will racism assume a quite different template in the future, in a futuristic world, where a possible rise in the population of androids and robots could lead to a man vs. machine tug-of-war for cosmos and consciousness? In the fourth paper, “Cosmos and Consciousness in the New Age Digital Aesthetics: An Exploration into the World of The Matrix and Final Fantasy VII,” T Prabhu discusses, with interesting examples from sci-fi works, the shift over the centuries in the human perception of utopias, with virtual worlds threatening to become sweeping social spaces where the real and the virtual coalesce to form the collective digitized unconscious.

But then, reality can at times be too dispiriting and tiring to be of any comfort. It is at such times, the mind seeks refuge in the illusory world of make-believe and self-effacement, as the characters in Eugene O’Neill’s plays often do in their bid to understand themselves in the larger scheme of things. In the fifth paper, “Illusion versus Reality in the Major Plays of Eugene O’Neill,” Neena Jain explores the endless struggles of O’Neill’s characters between the opposite poles of illusion and reality, love and hate, carnal desires and abstinence, and sees them as a manifestation of O’Neill’s own quest for identity and truth.

And again, a mismatch between self-image and public image, between what one thinks one is and what others think one really is, can at times result in tragic consequences. In the sixth paper, “A Comparative Study of the Protagonists in William Shakespeare’s King Lear and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons,” Deepak Chaswal and Pradeep Kumar Chaswal compare the two tragic heroes, King Lear and Joe Keller, and show how they fail in their roles as fathers, despite their ‘love’ for their children.

-- R Venkatesan Iyengar
Consulting Editor