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Poetic license
Is The 9/11 Commission Report the first American epic?
BY DANIEL AARON, LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER, AND HARVEY A. SILVERGLATE

The 9/11 Commission Report achieved singularity in the annals of American publishing even before it was available to the public. Five days before the Report’s July 22, 2004, release, the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States raced to complete its findings. Editors in the New York offices of W.W. Norton would have no opportunity to examine the document, which the company’s president had already agreed to carry sight unseen. On July 17, the commission staff uploaded files of the Report to a secure Web site. Within 120 hours of the manuscript’s completion, 580,000 copies of the authorized edition were printed, bound, shipped by air, received in bookstores, and shelved for sale at $10 apiece. By noon in each US time zone on July 22, customers from Washington, DC, to Hawaii, and Alaska to Puerto Rico, had purchased copies of The 9/11 Commission Report. Never before in US history had a book manuscript been so quickly turned around and made available throughout the nation.

The 9/11 Commission Report soon reached the top of bestseller lists. Within eight months, some nine million copies of various editions had been sold or downloaded from the commission’s Web site. Responding on Internet review pages, readers used the words "gripping," "riveting," "powerful," "American," and "universal" to describe the document. On October 13, 2004, the Report was nominated for the National Book Award in nonfiction. A Washington Post writer called it a "collective memoir" in the confessional mode, using an "ultra-spare, purposely unemotional — yet quietly seething — language of American pain."

Clearly, The 9/11 Commission Report struck a deep national chord, even as it resisted neat classification. It is a factual work, but in places it resembles fiction. It tells a story, but it is authorless. It is a written narrative, but it is informed by oral accounts. It tells of past events vital to the cohesion of a people, but it never loses sight of the fact that these events were era-changing, or that they have irreversibly altered the people’s future course — their fate. It is saturated with information, but the narrative glue that holds the details together is composed of familiar story threads, well-burnished by generations of retelling. It speaks in the language of its time, and addresses a national audience, but the narrative, extensively translated, engrosses a worldwide readership. Such an odd mixture of traits may at first glance suggest that the Report is a narrative anomaly, neither fish nor fowl. But these are also among the very traits that define the literary genre that the Report belongs to: the epic. Of course, only Americans themselves can decide whether the Report is to be America’s articulation of itself. Were that to happen, though, the Report could be the first work in American history to qualify compellingly as the nation’s epic.

Epics articulate deep and lasting values that give collective life coherence over time, from generation to generation. Chiefly taken up with a people’s common vision over the long haul, epics place action in a sacred temporal order that imparts continuity to secular facts and chaotic events. The 9/11 Commission Report may open in the middle of the story’s action, for example, but it also ranges back in time, to recount earlier events that bear on the story’s principal themes. It is not until a third of the way through that the Report considers "The Millennium Crisis" of 1999-2000. Seemingly unlinked threats follow — the USS Cole is attacked; the transition from the Clinton to the Bush administration yields a national fiasco — until a concluding account of US counterterrorism efforts through September 10, 2001, suggests that the unfolding story is not merely historical. Indeed, the Report presents 9/11 as the belated arrival of an apocalyptic event so fully anticipated as to appear preordained. Whatever their form — biblical visions, cosmic battles between good and evil, ideals worth dying for — sacred themes infuse even the most secular details of epic narratives with a glow of timelessness, and The 9/11 Commission Report, though fact-laden and bureaucratic, is no exception.

ABOVE AND BEYOND

The epic qualities of The 9/11 Commission Report begin precisely where the Report diverges in style, scope, and content from other US commission reports. Such reports are designed to halt debate about an unsettling national episode, even as they may evade hard questions and assign blame or pursue all-too-convenient conclusions. A case-in-point is The Roberts Commission Report (1942), which investigated America’s disturbing failure to prevent the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and saddled two American military commanders with the blame. (A Senate resolution exonerated them in 1999.) The commissioners made no attempt to explain or understand "the enemy" Japan, or the Japanese. Instead, the Roberts Commission satisfied itself with scapegoats, and broader questions were neither asked nor answered.

By contrast, the 9/11 Commission vastly exceeded its mandate. Like certain institutions within the American legal system that, under extraordinary circumstances, deviate from their established patterns — consider runaway grand juries that defy a prosecutor’s expectations, or those rare (but often memorable) Supreme Court opinions that speak with great latitude to principles broader than the precise legal questions at hand — the commission felt compelled to push the envelope to take up matters of elemental concern to the nation’s identity. In that vein, the commission actively probed the motives of Al Qaeda, and reconstructed a sequence of events in which Osama bin Laden and his associates planned and carried out their plot. Such probing into the workaday habits, operational plans, and ideology of the enemy, while unnecessary for assigning blame to parties in an unprepared America, is essential if the Report’s goal is to understand what the attacks mean to the nation.

 

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Issue Date: September 9 - 15, 2005
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