'9/11 may not be the 21st century's variation of the Holocaust played out with higher technology'

There is no poetry after Auschwitz." For Adorno, the raw power of reality was too overwhelming to be captured by imagination. That moment in history was about the limits of metaphor; it was also about the redundancy of what Dostoevsky had once hoped: beauty shall save the world.Time doesn't heal. It allows memory to revisit the abandoned spaces of history. That perhaps explains, in spite of Adorno, how the pages powered by the Holocaust have become a sub-genre in twentieth century literature. You can still return to Primo Levi or W.G. Sebald and realise how the art of remembrance brings back to our consciousness what the history books cannot. 911 may not be the twenty-first century's variation of the Holocaust played out with higher technology. Still, in the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was the event that shattered the cosy triumphalism of the West. The velocity of hate on that morning of September 11 ten years ago pierced the velvet veneer of peace that characterised the post-Cold War world. Suddenly, diplomatese borrowed from the Old Testament and Evil acquired a synonym in the mountain prophet of jihad. In America, fear and sorrow defined the politics of rejoinder. And who was writing 911, or even the Day After? So-called 911 literature is still a narrative of echoes. Imagination is yet to redeem that September flame from the notebook of the reporter or the rhetoric of the politician. The towering inhumanity of the attack may have found its way into the pages of Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Safran Foer, but it is still a story told within the demands of deadlines, or, at best, a subject for narrative non-fiction, such as Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower.Is it because 911 is still intimately yesterday? Commemorative rituals apart, America is not wallowing in victimhood. It has travelled a long distance from the sentimentalism of Ground Zero, and even the life sketches of the dramatis personae are steeped in bathos. Saddam Hussein didn't play any role in 911, but his journey from the gilded bunkers to the banality of a spider hole to the inevitability of the gallows became, in the twisted morality of "the just war", an American victory. (In retrospect, only Iraqis should have been celebrating.) Osama bin Laden, the original provocateur, was even denied an end worthy of a Frederick Forsyth thriller when he fell to American bullets in a safe house in Pakistan. And no one seems to be singing hymns to George W. Bush, the retired warrior-in-chief in his Texas retreat. Al Qaeda is no longer "the base" of Arab resentment; it has been made redundant by the romance of the street. In the new iconography of freedom, the grainy image of Osama raging against the satanic West from Mount Jihad has been replaced by the young rebels in Cairo or Tripoli declaring independence from the enemy within. The new freedom fighter doesn't need a bogeyman, and it is not the Book that sustains his revolution. He doesn't yearn for the Great Yesterday; he fights for a reasonable tomorrow. Maybe the world is too transfixed by this struggle to imagine the blaze of 911.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Sep 9, 2011 22:47 IST--- ENDS ---

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'9/11 may not be the 21st century's variation of the Holocaust played out with higher technology'

In the new iconography of freedom, the grainy image of Osama raging against the satanic West from Mount Jihad has been replaced by the young rebels in Cairo or Tripoli declaring independence from the enemy within.

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