9/11 Response (Andrea)

We always talk about where we were on 9/11, so I was in sixth grade in the middle of standardized testing. After testing in the morning, they called us to our homerooms and our teachers gave us the news. Maybe it says more about the atmosphere of my own home growing up than about the state of the country, but my first thought was that the End Times must be near. Eleven-year-old me is an increasingly incomprehensible being to twenty-two-year-old me, but I can see now how those apocalyptic impulses helped to rationalize horror and chaos.

            In Carlson’s contribution to “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy in the Wake of September 11,” he argues that America tends to deal with pain and suffering through the literary model of melodrama, not tragedy: “Pain and suffering were not the result of inexplicable forces in the universe, but of the machinations of evil characters, who were inevitably eventually thwarted and vanquished” (133). To identify 9/11 as a tragedy would be to admit some hubris or culpability, and the political model that was quickly established portrayed ‘us’ as the heroic victim and ‘them’ as cowardly and evil. I instinctively chose this melodramatic model as well, casting the bad guys in the role of Satan or Anti-Christ who persecutes the holy. As a nation, we also identified ourselves as a righteous people. We put flags on everything. We said, “God bless America” a lot. Whether the imagery was religious, racial, or political (and it was most often a combination of the three), we made sense of the event by making it a melodrama.

            Artaud’s view of performance represents the reaction to 9/11 better than Brecht’s, but Brecht might better represent the attitude toward 9/11 and the events that followed it. When the planes hit and the towers fell, we were confronted with a kind of theatre of cruelty—not the cruelty of thousands of deaths, but cruelty in the Artaudian sense: “that much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can practice on us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us, first of all, that” (The Theatre and Its Double 256). 

Even though I had no physical connection to the events, they affected me because I was imaginatively invested in them and I wanted to find a pattern of meaning in the raw experience and emotion. The pattern of melodrama was easy and near at hand, in my case manifesting embarrassingly as the coming of the apocalypse. Brecht might have strong criticisms of this visceral reaction and the decisions to which it led us, perhaps as strong as the criticisms we ourselves have today, after eleven years worth of critical distance.