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September 13, 2001 CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK Struggling to Find Words for a Horror Beyond Words

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Language failed this week.

"Beyond comprehension," "beyond our worst imaginings," "beyond belief" — those were the phrases heard again and again in the last two days. As people struggled to describe the events of Tuesday morning, they reached for metaphors and analogies that might capture the horror of what they had seen. One witness on NBC local news described the World Trade Center collapse as "one more circle of Dante's hell." Brian Williams on MSNBC compared it to Mount St. Helen's. Tom Brokaw on NBC compared it to "nuclear winter." Diane Sawyer on ABC compared it to standing on "the edge of a crater of a volcano."

Chris Matthews said it was "bigger than the Hindenberg, bigger than the Titanic." Many others invoked Pearl Harbor, but no one could come up a phrase like President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy," which summed up the nation's sense of terror and grief and anger.

In a day when hype and hyperbole have become a staple of cable news, in a day when the word "reality" has become associated with stage-managed fame-fests like "Survivor" and "Big Brother," words felt devalued and inadequate to capture the disasters at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and near Pittsburgh. After all, we live in a culture where inflationary phrases like "nuclear scenario" were attached to the developments in last year's Florida election imbroglio, a culture in which cable television networks have repeatedly cried wolf, devoting hours of sensationalistic and alarmist coverage to shark attacks only a week or two ago.

For some time now, reality has felt increasingly surreal, increasingly impervious to the efforts of writers to show us "the way we live now," in Trollope's words.

"The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying

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to understand, describe and then make credible much of American reality," wrote Philip Roth in an essay in Commentary magazine. "It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist."

Those words were not written in response to this week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They were written back in 1961, before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, before the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., before the social upheavals of the late 60's, before Vietnam, Watergate, the Clinton follies and last year's election standoff.

Because reality seemed so absurd, so "chaotic, fragmented, random, discontinuous," in Tom Wolfe's words, many novelists abandoned the effort to write about American public life in the wake of the 60's. Some, like Ann Beattie, Harold Brodkey and for many years Mr. Roth, focused on the private realm of the self, on the convolutions of the individual psyche. Others, like John Barth and Donald Barthelme, contented themselves with performing postmodern experiments with fable, farce and recycled fairy tales.

Given our democratic government and pragmatic philosophic outlook, magical realism — as practiced by writers from Latin America, Eastern Europe, India and Africa as a narrative strategy for grappling with turbulent political realities that elude naturalistic description — was never really mastered in this country. In the hands of American writers like Alice Hoffman, it all too often devolved into cuteness and whimsy, devoid of a historical context.

Mr. Wolfe — who wrote a famous manifesto urging novelists to "head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property" — attempted to pen big, sprawling, Dickensian novels based on lots of legwork and reporting, and writers like Don DeLillo, Richard Price and Robert Stone did find their own anomalous ways of tackling the social canvas of late-20th-century American life. Mr. Wolfe's 1987 novel, "The Bonfire of the Vanities," which featured a Harlem minister who uses his gifts of gab and spin control to orchestrate racial outrage, proved eerily prophetic, appearing months before the events involving Tawana Brawley and the Rev. Al Sharpton broke in the news.

For the most part, however, large- scale terrorist plots and huge public disasters — so sensationalist in tone, seemingly so far removed from our daily reality — have

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remained the province of commercial screenwriters and novelists like Tom Clancy, whose 1994 novel, "Debt of Honor," featured a plot in which a Boeing 747 is crashed by a Japanese airman into the Capitol building during a joint session of Congress, killing virtually everyone. The Sylvester Stallone movie "Daylight" postulated a disastrous explosion in the Holland Tunnel; "Die Hard 2" showed terrorists taking over the air control system at Dulles Airport and crashing an airplane; and "Black Sunday" depicted a extremist group planning to blow up the Superbowl with explosives loaded on a blimp. "Executive Decision" depicted Arab terrorists armed with a nerve-gas bomb who take control of a 747 and head for Washington.

Inevitably, many witnesses and television commentators on Tuesday turned to film analogies to describe what they had seen. In a culture that promotes Jerry Bruckheimer's "Pearl Harbor" as a big summer entertainment, in a culture besotted with disaster movies, there was an initial sense of déjà vu and disbelief on the part of these spectators — the impulse to see what was happening as one of those digital special effects from the big screen. This couldn't really be happening, they suggested; this is something from the realm of pulp fiction, unaccountably thrust into the province of real life. "It is apocalyptic," said Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association. An air travel consultant on MSNBC said that people looking at the disaster thought they were seeing "Die Hard 2, Die Hard 6." A cameraman on CNN said it was "like covering a very bad horror movie." Images of the World Trade Center exploding and collapsing into a pile of rubble; images of people running for their lives through the canyons of Wall Street; images of smoke and fire billowing from the caved-in walls of the Pentagon — these images, shown on an endless loop on every television station, were repeatedly compared to the destruction of New York and Washington in "Independence Day"; the terror of the people trapped in the twin towers to "Towering Inferno."

It may seem trivializing — even obscene — to talk about movies in the same breath as this week's tragedy, but the fact that so many people did was a symptom of our inability to get our minds around this disaster, our inability to find real-life precedents, real-life analogies for what happened in the morning hours of Sept. 11.

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