First Person Plural: American Poetry and 9/11

9/11 was the most significant social experience in the United States for a generation, so it is not surprising that American intellectuals and academics have produced a flood of commentary on it. Probably no less expected is the fact that most of this commentary shares certain assumptions. The most basic of these is the notion that 9/11 was in essence a commanding media spectacle that powerfully affected American consciousness and culture. This premise underlies, for example, the characterization of 9/11 as a 'monstrous dose of reality' (Susan Sontag), whose consequence was that 'America was forced to realize what kind of world it was part of' (Slavoj Zizek). Of course, intellectual commentators typically do not include themselves among those who were somehow shaken awake (or brainwashed, or traumatized-the metaphors vary). But they do assume that Americans in the mass were involuntarily shaped by the experience. We know, of course, that many millions watched it on television. But what is at stake in going a step further and claiming that 9/11 was not only seen by the nation, but somehow happened to the nation? For one thing, such a view is roughly parallel with the nationalist oversimplification of 9/11 as an 'attack on America,' an attack on 'all of us,' after which 'everything changed.' To say that 9/11 opened a crack in Americans' formerly insulated mentality, or that it inaugurated a new phase of culture, is like saying that we are all at war now: such claims rule out the possibility of individual detachment from social experience. It is in this light that Robert Pinsky's '9/11' merits a special distinction. This paper's thesis is that, among the many published responses to the catastrophe, this poem alone defiantly suggests that Americans were not in fact 'united' by 9/11 (as propagandists claim) nor 'hailed' by it into a nationalist ideology (as theorists claim). Nor were they spellbound or traumatized. Written in the first person plural, the poem unexpectedly aligns its voice with Americans in the mass, but it embodies an autonomous, detached viewpoint. (Pinsky gives form to this viewpoint-at once public and personal- by accommodating something like the chorus of classical drama within his otherwise lyrical frame.) The question that the poem raises is whether, in an age when mass spectacles like 9/11 succeed each other rapidly in the communal consciousness, such experiences are sufficient to provide Americans with shared memories that will 'hold them together.' Ultimately, so this paper argues, the poem suggests that something other than shared memories must constitute the American national character.