"It's About Us! Violence and Narrative Memory in Post 9/11 American Theater." Arcadia

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ILKA SAAL

“It’s about us!”

Violence and Narrative Memory in Post 9/11 American Theater

Trauma work entails not only the mending of physical and psychic wounds, but also thereconstruction of narrative structures. In the wake of September 11, there were, as Don DeLilloput it, “1000, 000 stories […] waiting to be told.” And yet, the nation chose to inscribe only aselect few into the nation’s collective memory. Ann Nelson’s The Guys (2001), Neil LaBute’s TheMercy Seat (2002), and Karen Finley’s Make Love (2003) are paradigmatic examples offorming narrative memory in the American theater. The article shows how these dramaticnarratives interact with their cultural context. It explores the ways in which these plays mightspeak to Judith Butler’s concern for a proper ethical framing of traumatic memory, one thatinterlinks the mourning for the vulnerability of the self with an awareness of the vulnerability ofothers. So far, American theater has shown little interest in working out what Butler has calledan “ethics of vulnerability.” It has frequently fallen back on either the celebratory affirmation ofnationhood (Nelson) or its sarcastic questioning (LaBute). It is only in Finley’s performance piecethat we begin to see an attempt to move beyond such unilateral accounts of suffering.

“Today, again the world narrative belongs to terrorists,” Don DeLillo declared inDecember 2001 (33). The striking inclusion of the adverb “again” here takes upthe provocative claim delivered by DeLillo already a decade earlier in his novelMao II (1991), where he insisted that in a world saturated with commodifiedspectacles, it was no longer the writer but the terrorist who was still capable ofdrawing instantaneous world-wide attention, of impacting consciousness andmaking history. Ten years later, he takes us in a slightly different direction,describing the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as the violent battleof two opposing narratives: the narrative of modernity and globalization � laAmericain and, responding to it, the apocalyptic narrative of terror. On 9/11, theformer narrative “ends in the rubble,” DeLillo famously wrote (34). But he alsodefiantly added, “it is left to us to create the counternarrative” (ibid.), for “livinglanguage is not diminished” (39). And while language might not be adequate torender the horror of the day, it can “give memory, tenderness and meaning to allthat howling space” (ibid.). Richard Powers similarly declared, “There are nowords, but there are only words” (21).

In the wake of September 11, American writers responded promptly andcopiously to the gaping wound the attacks had left not only in the national

arcadia Band 45 (2010) Heft 2DOI 10.1515/ARCA.2010.021

AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR


http://www.degruyter.de/journals/arcadia

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landscape but also in the nation’s consciousness. Poetic language was frequentlyadministered like a bandage to “soak up grief, disbelief, and rage,” as Ulrich Baerpoints out in the introduction to one of the first anthologies of what was soon tobe known as 9/11 literature (2). More than that, “by embedding the initial shockin narratives, poems, theater and tales” literature and the performing arts helpedto “sear the event into the collective imagination” (Baer 3). It is precisely thisprocess of inscribing the event into the nation’s collective memory that interestsme here. “There are 100,000 stories crisscrossing New York, Washington, andthe world, waiting to be told,” DeLillo insists (34), but which of them shall wetell? And how ought we to tell them? Moreover, how effective are our stories incountering the violent narrative of terror as well as in healing the collectivewound that it produced? Finally, which of the 100,000 stories will ultimatelyconstitute the larger counter-narrative DeLillo calls for; which will be the onethat will be commemorated by the nation?

As Judith Butler reminds us, while a collective narrative framing of the eventis essential to our experience and understanding of trauma, there is nothinginnocent about it. For it is this very narrative frame that enables certain kinds ofquestions and historical inquiries and precludes others, in this manner alsodeciding “in a forceful way, what we can hear, whether a view will be taken as anexplanation or as exoneration, whether we can hear the difference and abide byit” (Butler 4– 5). Ultimately, it is also this very narrative frame that determineswhether “the experience of violence and loss have to lead straightaway to militaryviolence and retribution” or whether “something can be made of grief besides acry for war” (xi). Paying attention to the narrative framing of 9/11 is therefore ofthe utmost importance not only with regard to the manner in which the eventwill be commemorated and inscribed into the nation’s memory but also withregard to how the nation will position itself in the world now and in the future,how it will engage the very Otherness that has temporarily threatened its ex-istence. As I will show in more detail below, Butler’s ultimate concern is with anethics of vulnerability, a “collective responsibility for the physical lives of oneanother” (30). Mindfulness of the vulnerability of self and others, she insists,“can become the basis for non-military political solutions, just as the denial ofthis vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery can fuel the instruments of war”(29). This, then, is the question at stake: how to frame our experience of thewound in an ethical way, so that all deaths become equally grievable, so that theworld can be rebuilt in a manner that ensures that lives will be respected andprotected equally in New York and Kabul, in Washington and Baghdad?

Over the past eight years, a great number of stories have been told about theattacks of September 11, particularly in poetry, short fiction, and novels.1 The

1 See anthologies of poetry and short fiction such as Ulrich Baer’s 110 Stories (2002), Dennis LoyJohnson’s Poetry After 9 –11. An Anthology of New York Poets (2002), and the government-

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American theater, too, responded promptly. Yet, despite Robert Brustein’s fer-vent assertion that “the American theater is perfectly positioned to chronicle thenational unease” (245), few productions attempted to tackle the events straighton.2 Attempts to speak directly to the tragedy were put forth in Israel Horovitz’s 3Weeks after Paradise (2001), Christopher Shinn’s Where Do We Live (2002),Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros’s Omnium Gatherum (2003),Craig Wright’s Recent Tragic Events (2003), Jonathan Bell’s Portraits (2003), andStephen Drukman’s Another Fine Mess (2003) – to name the more prominentones. Most of these plays, however, can be summed up as what theater scholarWalter Uka refers to as an “aggressive cluelessness” (“aggressive Ratlosigkeit”) vis-�-vis September 11 (155). In his opinion, the “all-too-political” is here all tooeasily diffused in the affirmation of the “all-too-human.”3 What seems to bemissing, in other words, is the attempt to turn the event into what Bertolt Brechttermed “die grossen Gegenst�nde” – the great discourses of theater which engageclosely with the political, economic, and social foundations and implications ofcatastrophe.

In what follows, I would like to examine three of the plays emerging in thewake of 9/11 more closely: Ann Nelson’s The Guys (2001), Neil LaBute’s TheMercy Seat (2002), and Karen Finley’s performance piece Make Love (2003). I amparticularly interested in the ways in which these plays speak to Judith Butler’sconcern, mentioned above, for a proper, ethical narrative framing of trauma. Toexpress an ethics of vulnerability has so far not come easy to the Americantheater; on the contrary, it has frequently fallen back on either the celebratoryaffirmation of nationhood (Nelson) or its sarcastic questioning (LaBute). Rarely,as I shall show, has it attempted to move beyond such unilateral accounts ofsuffering – Finley’s performance being the remarkable exception.

sponsored publication Writers on America (2002) as well as novels such as Jonathan Safran Foer’sExtremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), Jay McInerney’s TheGood Life (2006), Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006), Fr�d�ric Beigbeder’s Window on the World (2006),and Don DeLillo’s own Falling Man (2007).

2 9/11 was frequently referenced and evoked indirectly in a number of productions, such as MaryZimmerman’s Metamorphoses – an adaptation of Ovid’s poem of the same title – which reopenedin October 2001 at Second Stage in New York City and moved to the Circle-in-the-Square inFebruary 2002. Consider also Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, which though written andcompleted before September 11, premiered only in December 2001, and was thus also inevitablyreceived through the lens of the preceding catastrophe. In addition, theater practitioners havecommented abundantly on the meaning of 9/11 for the American theater; see e. g. Lenora Brownet al, “The View from Here”; David Rom�n, “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy in the Wake ofSeptember 11, 2001”; and Emmy Grinwis et al, “Up Front: American Theaters Reflect on theEvents of September 11.”

3 Uka is here taking up the verdict of theater critic Jordan Mejias. See Mejias, “Und zum Nachtischeinen Terroristen,” 35.

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Portraits of Grief

Anne Nelson’s The Guys has become one of the more widely known American“9/11” plays.4 One of the first dramatic responses to 9/11, the play catered to adire need for representation, bespeaking an urgency and immediacy that ap-pealed to many New York theatergoers. As Bruce Weber of the New York Timesput it, “it has the impact – half-relieving, half-agonizing – of a chill salve on anopen wound” (1). Nelson likewise explains the purpose of her play as providing“a memorial of words, both to those who had died and to those who were tryingto find a way to go on” (xxii).

The premise of the play, based on the actual experience of the author5, is verystraightforward: a fire captain, having lost eight of his men in the recent attackson the WTC and being called upon to present eulogies at their memorialservices, finds himself incapable of conveying his feelings to the congregation ofmourners: “What can I say to them? How can I explain it?” Nick asks de-spondently (11). In his despair, he turns to a journalist, Joan, for help. Togetherthey attempt to compose a narrative that, on the one hand, gives testimony to thelives of the men lost in the collapse of the towers and, on the other, providesthem, as survivors of the catastrophe, with a sense of coherence and purpose.Having watched the catastrophe on TV and knowing that all her loved ones aresafe, Joan has felt particularly helpless and isolated in the face of a nationalcalamity: “Everyone wanted to help. But we couldn’t. They didn’t want amateurswandering around the city. […] Plumbers and carpenters first, they said. In-tellectuals to the back of the line” (7). By the end, just as Joan is able to give wordsto Nick’s trauma, Nick succeeds in alleviating Joan’s “crisis of marginality”(ibid.). Evidently, “the firefighter needs a writer” (ibid.). With this statementNelson intuits most clearly the extent to which coping with catastrophe entailsnot only rescue and reconstruction work but also the reconstruction of narrativestructures.

4 Trevor Biship claims that in the wake of the attacks a new dramatic genre came into being, whichhe terms “Post 9/11 Theater.” Its trademark, so he writes, is the attempt “to dramatize the effects ofwar-like trauma, using the modes of language and dramatic form for distinct emotional andhistorical effect” (21).

5 In the “Preface” to her play, Ann Nelson describes the fortuitous genesis of the play. Few days afterthe attacks, Nelson, a journalist by profession, was approached by a family friend to help a firecaptain with the writing of the eulogies for the men of his company who were lost in the WTC. Afew weeks later, in October 2001, she attended a professional dinner in New York City andincidentally found herself seated next to theater director Jim Simpson. In the course of theconversation, the idea arose to work her experience with the fire captain into a play. Aside fromproviding testimony to the events of September 11, the play was meant to help Simpson’sdowntown Flea Theatre, which, having lost its audiences, was struggling with insolvency. SeeNelson, The Guys, xvii-xxv.

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As Elaine Scarry has compellingly demonstrated in her study The Body inPain, “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it” (4).It actively undoes both our physical world as well as the language that we need toaccess it. The reconstruction of language is therefore essential not only for thepurpose of giving testimony to pain and suffering but also for healing, for theremaking of the world, as theorists of trauma, such as Cathy Caruth andDominick LaCapra, have also pointed out. However, in translating the woundinto narratives, the trauma loses not only its original force but also its essentialincomprehensibility ; it loses what Caruth describes as “the force of its affront tounderstanding” (Trauma 154, italics hers). As Caruth explains, “[f ]or the survivorof trauma, the truth of the event may reside not only in its brutal facts, but also inthe way that their occurrence defies simple comprehension” (153). These, then,are the dilemmas encountered both by the survivors of trauma as well as thetherapists, historians, and cultural workers who attempt to facilitate narrativeintegration: how to understand the nature of suffering without eliminating theforce and truth of its incommunicability; how to know the past without re-ducing the complex reality that the survivor tries to convey? And how to mournand reconstruct ethically?

The distinctive achievement of Nelson’s play consists in compellingly ren-dering in the figure of Nick the struggle of rebuilding destroyed narrativestructures. This became particularly visible during Bill Murray’s performance ofNick, who, according to reviewers, succeeded in rendering “the aching soul ofthe shell-shocked Nick, who lost eight men on September 11 and is terrified atthe thought of delivering eight eulogies” (Isherwood, “The Guys” 40).Throughout the play, Nick is fumbling for words, as evident in the many“dramatized silences” (Biship 26) and the frequent ellipses that mark his speech.More explicitly, Nick remarks, “I been [sic] sitting down in front of a piece ofpaper all day, and I haven’t been able to write one sentence. Not a thing – I keepgoing into a clutch. I mean I’m not a writer under normal circumstances. Butnow… What can I tell the families? What am I going to say?” (9). Notably, Nickfeels alienated by the language of the media, insisting that it does not do justice tohis memories of his co-workers and his experience of their death: “I keep hearingall these speeches from the politicians on TV. The pictures in the papers. Herothis, hero that. I don’t even recognize them” (12). Repeatedly, we behold Nick“look[ing] around him, uncertainly, with an apologetic, disoriented expression”(8) or “look[ing] up to [Joan] helplessly” (9, 12).

In the encounter of Nick and Joan, Nelson cleverly stages the fraught butultimately fruitful symbiosis between trauma and language. Where Nick appears“unfocused” (8), “helpless” (9), and “mut[ed]” (11), Joan coaxes him on gentlyand “encouragingly” (13). With confidence and resolve, she takes down hisdisjointed thoughts, rearranging them into a narrative that Nick can recognize.By the end of the play, when we watch Nick deliver one of the eulogies in public,





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“he begins the oratory, in a simple, unpretentious, dignified way. He reads welland confidently, with affection.” “He’s in control,” so the stage directions informus (56). And yet, one wonders whether the play does not all too readily providewords for Nick.

The following exchange is just one example for the effortlessness with whichJoan gives shape to Nick’s disconnected observations:

NICK: […] There’s just not much to say. This hero stuff, like they were some guy in a movie.But Bill, he wasn’t like this. He was just an ordinary guy. A schmo. If Bill walked into a room,nobody would even notice. You can’t say that in a eulogy.JOAN: Hey, it’s okay. Don’t worry. We’ll do this. I mean, people who are ordinary … in a …an extraordinary situation – that’s what this is about. (12, italics mine)

One wonders whether such stock narrative framing does indeed facilitatecomprehension of the complexity of the event or whether it does not, in fact,compromise Nick’s voice and the memory of his “guys.” Several reasons lead meto believe that the latter is the case. First of all, the framing of suffering as“ordinary people in extraordinary situations” is strikingly reminiscent of Hol-lywood’s tried and worn-out rendition of the blossoming of humanity underduress. As Theodor Adorno warns us, this trope is a rather deceptive affair likelyto become “a dreary metaphysics that affirms the horror, which has been justifiedas a ‘boundary situation,’ by virtue of the notion that the authenticity of thehuman being is manifested there” (88– 89). Second, Joan ends up reproducingthe very hero narratives that Nick has been so weary of when listening to themedia. “We’ve been hearing a lot about heroes, and Bill was one of them,” shebegins her eulogy. “He gave his life for others, and that is a noble thing” (16).This pattern of interaction is repeated three times throughout the play: Joaninterviewing Nick about the victims to be able to render a portrait of “someonethey recognize. Not just a plaster saint” (16), but then ultimately translatingNick’s fumbling attempts at narrative integration into boilerplate statements,such as “Patrick was a fine father. It was a quality he brought to the firehouse. Hehad the calm presence that you look for in a leader” (43). Granted, rendering thecomplexities of someone’s life in such easily recognizable and celebratory tropescomes with the genre of a eulogy. But the play as a whole never moves beyondsuch commonplace assertions. Thirdly then, in the end, Joan’s narrative framecannot offer anything but the rather trite dramatic insight, “I knew then thatevery time I saw a person on the street, I saw only his public shadow. […] Wehave no idea what wonders lie hidden in the people around us” (39).

The phrase “the hidden wonders of a person” is, moreover, reminiscent of yetanother popular narrative that turned out to be paradigmatic for the framing of9/11: the New York Times series of “Portraits of Grief,” which the paper ran frommid September till mid December, with supplements being publishedthroughout 2002 as well as in 2003, eventually numbering close to 2,400 eu-

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logies. Attempting to provide, as the editors put it, “snapshots of lives inter-rupted as they were being actively lived” (Raines vii), the portraits all followedthe same pattern: a photo of the victim (typically, against the background oftheir wedding reception, family vacation or office party) along with a poignantheadline (such as, “A Quiet Family Man,” “A Wife, a Mother, a Doer,” “AParadigm of Patience”), which was then explained in a brief, endearing anecdoteincluding “tiny but telling details that seemed to reveal something true andessential about how each person lived” (J. Scott, “Introduction” ix).

This narrative structure enabled the editors to accomplish several things atonce. Since each eulogy was similar in length (ca. 200 words) and structure andsince all victims were commemorated in positive and heartwarming terms, TheNew York Times essentially provided a public venue for mourning that wasperceived by many as “utterly democratic” (ibid.). Second, since the anecdote, byits very nature, tends to focus on a biographical incident in quotidian settings,the newspaper also effectively personalized the enormous scope of suffering,“putting a human face on numbers that are unimaginable” (J. Scott, “In-troduction” ix). In this manner, it not only provided what Nancy Miller termed“the footprint of human scale – and of community” (123), but it also ensured thestrong visceral effect of the portraits. “As you read those individual portraitsabout love affairs and kissing children goodbye or coaching soccer and buying adream house […] it’s obvious that every one of them was a person who deservedto live a full and successful life,” editor Janny Scott comments (ibid.). Evenhardened regime critics could not easily resist such melodramatic pathos. SusanSontag publicly confessed, “I read the ‘Portraits of Grief,’ every last word, everysingle day. I was tremendously moved. I had tears in my eyes every morning”(qtd. in J. Scott, “Closing a Scrapbook” 6).

Moreover, taken collectively, these eulogies also began to form a collectivenarrative that could be inscribed into the nation’s cultural memory. In distillingthe ‘essence’ of each life into distinctive typologies of domestic and civic virtue(the caring mother, the good neighbor, the ingenious businessman, the bravefirefighter), the anecdotes all strove to highlight the innate virtue and innocenceof each and every victim. The result of such a universally positive depiction of thevictims – in which “anyone depressed over his weight became ‘a gentle giant’ andevery binge drinker […] the life of the party” (Mallon 7) – was the smoothingaway of all possible differences between these individuals. What emerged insteadwas a collective of “elevated beings,” as the Times editors put it, whose prematuredeaths deprived not only individual families but the entire nation. Moreover,through such metonymic transfer, the virtue of the common American man (andwoman) was extended to the nation as a whole according to the melodramatic





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logic that stipulates that undeserved suffering is always the telltale sign of anessential (even though temporarily misrecognized) innocence.6

I believe that we ought to read Nelson’s play in light of the melodramaticrhetoric of the Portraits.7 Just like the Times’ portraits, Nelson distills in hereulogies clear and easily recognizable American types: the paternal leader (Pat-rick), the dependable trooper (Bill), the rough guy with the golden heart (Bar-ney), and the silent but determined newcomer (Jimmy). Moreover, just like theTimes, Nelson focuses her portraits on the small domestic detail : Bill’s acerbicbut good-natured food criticism, Patrick’s unbeatable Waldorf Salad, and Bar-ney’s love for old tools. With this she accomplishes two things; she enhances thesentimental appeal of the story for her audience by making her subjects, as sheputs it, “human” (“We got to make him human” 42), and she amplifies thedomestic detail against a national frame of reference. As Nancy Miller writeswith regard to the Times’ penchant for domestic detail in their “Portraits ofGrief”: “They are crafted to serve as the microcosm of family life, of communityvalues, of a valiant and, though wounded, above all, happy America. The do-mestic detail of the toothbrush comes to stand for the intimacy of the home, andthe home for the nation’s public life: the home front against the incursions ofterrorism” (122, italics mine). Moreover, at the heart of such consolidation ofnationhood – both in Nelson and in the Portraits – is the American middle-classhome and its ethics of “work, church, family,” to use Joan’s words (34). Thesetraditional American values are here once again mobilized as the kernel andessence of national identity and the ultimate stronghold against crisis.8

Seen in this light, what ultimately matters is not so much Nick’s experience oftrauma but Joan’s narrative framing thereof. In fact, rather than bringing uscloser to an understanding of “the guys,” the play as a whole ironically pushes usfurther and further away from them and Nick. Nelson increasingly shifts thefocus of attention to Joan’s experience of the crisis. Joan, so we learn very early on,experienced 9/11 on TV. It is her urge not to be left “outside” that ultimately

6 According to Linda Williams, “victim-heroes and the recognition of their virtue” (or “suffering asinnocence”) is one of the five characteristics that she identifies as typical for the melodramaticgenre; the others being: the portrayal of primary psychic roles organized in Manichean conflicts ofgood and evil (virtue vs. villainy), the desired return to a real or imaginary locus of innocence, thedialectics of pathos and action, and its complex interaction with realism (social problems arestaged in terms of individual morality). See Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 65 – 77.

7 The 2002 film version of The Guys makes this reference to the Portraits of Grief explicit, when itzooms in on Sigourney Weaver (as Joan) reading the portraits in Central Park during her lunchbreak. The Guys, dir. Jim Simpson, USA 2002.

8 The American middle-class home as the locus of innocence is heavily underlined in the filmadaptation: Joan conducts the interviews with Nick in her sister’s brownstone in Park Slope. Atsome point, we see a shot of Sigourney Weaver surrounded by her two children plus the threechildren of her sister. This is the place that the narrative wants to return to at all cost – a typicalcharacteristic of melodrama. See Williams, “Melodrama Revised.”

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drives the play: “Was I outside? I don’t want to be – not so far. This is my city, too.I can’t just watch it on TV” (45). Her reflections structure the play formally (thethree conversations with Nick are framed and interspersed by five monologues)as well as in terms of content. We end up learning more about her and her familythan about Nick and his personal background. Yet, note, that in sharp contrast toNick, her world has not been undone by the terrorist attacks; it has not, in anyfundamental way, been called into question (even though Joan keeps insistingthat she is confronted with a “new normal” now, 56). As she ponders the gapingwound in Lower Manhattan, she continues to enjoy her unharmed middle-classhome on the Upper West Side (“filled with music and poetry,” 4), to pick upStarbucks coffee on her way to work as university professor, and to relish herwell-groomed family, complete with a genteel husband “who liked opera morethan football” and “two charming children in a good private school” (4). As onereviewer of the film version astutely points out, Nick and Joan are markedlyseparated by differences of class, education (we might add ethnicity)9 – but noneof these differences are explored in the play (A. O. Scott 5). Rather, they areswept aside in an attempt to give a unilateral account of suffering. In the end, it isJoan’s point of view, and hers only, which is deployed to make sense of Nick’spain. This is most drastically underlined in the film adaptation, where in thefinal scene, we observe Joan lip-synching the text she has written for Nick, as hefinally delivers the eulogies in church.

While several theater critics have delicately pointed to the dramatic andconceptual shortcomings of the play10, they hardly dared to criticize it outright inthe first months of its run. On the contrary, as Bruce Weber of New York Timesinsisted, “conventional assessment doesn’t do justice to the show” (1).11 Rather,so many agreed, it was its very rawness and immediacy that spoke to the historicalmoment and satisfied the audience’s need for “understanding a very specific kindof pain [that] from the outside seems only blindingly enormous and beyondsharing” (Kissel 30). Moreover, as reviewer Mark Evans asserts, “The Guys isdifficult to criticize – in much the same way that it’s hard to fault a funeraloration” (5).

This remark also speaks to the politics and ethics underlying the particularnarrative framing of trauma attempted by Nelson as well as The New York Times’

9 Nick’s last name, Flanagan, suggests that, like many of the New York firefighters, Nick was of Irishdescent; more specifically, he was most likely Irish Catholic.

10 See, for instance, reviews by Howard Kissel, who refers to the dramaturgy as “monochromatic”and akin to “reporting” (“9/11 Sets the Stage for New Play”) as well as by Peter Marks, whoconcurs with other critics that the play “has the earmarks of a first draft” (“ATheatrical Candle in aShrine to Sept. 11.”).

11 Charles Spencer was less diplomatic in his review of the London opening (starring Tim Robbinsand Susan Sarandon), calling the show “smug and sanctimonious” as well as “glibly and pre-maturely packaged for entertainment.” See Spencer, “Smug and Sanctimonious,” 20.





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“Portraits.” As Simon Stow explains, a narrative frame designed particularly toinvoke tears and public display of grief (cf. Sontag’s confession) ultimately dis-torts the democratic process of mourning for it carries the risk that mourningmight not end and instead turn into anger (“why did this happen to us?”). Griefthat becomes wrath, however, “clouds good judgment, eroding all considerationsof justice, reciprocity, and even self-interest in favor of its own singular per-spective” (Stow 229, italics mine) – a process that will ultimately obscure thepolitical by the personal (Stow 238). This is why public eulogists in antiquity(such as Pericles) as well as in the Early Republic (such as Abraham Lincoln in his“Gettysburg Address”) did not dwell on the individual portraits of suffering andavoided rendering familiar detail, so that they could “protect the polity from thenecessarily distorting �laston p�nthos, the mourning that could never end” (Stow229). As Stow shows, an excessive public display of grief is not only pornographic(for it perpetually delays closure) but also likely to turn into a justification forrevenge.

Without doubt, Nelson’s play The Guys had its time and place as well as itsaudience (the show ran for 13 months at the downtown Flea Theater, beforebeing turned into a movie adaptation by Jim Simpson in 2002.12 But rather thanconsigning its affective potency to a particular historic moment, as some criticsdo (Weber), I want to suggest that at that particular moment (fall 2001 to earlysummer 2002), the play also effectively contributed to the formation of a largernational counter-narrative – one that arguably opposed what DeLillo called thenarrative of terror with a narrative violence of its own, namely a violent accountof trauma.

Towards an Ethics of Mourning

As Butler and other public intellectuals have pointed out, 9/11 momentarilydisrupted the nation’s narcissistic understanding of itself, providing it with anopportunity to acknowledge its interdependency with other nations; yet, thenarratives triggered by this event immediately shored-up a first-person per-spective that reasserted impenetrable boundaries between self and other (“whydo they hate us so much?”). Since the attacks were experienced as a profounddecentring of “the narrative ‘I’ within the international political domain” (Butler6 –7) – a position that was uninhabitable for the US – the collective narrativeaccount of 9/11 needed to “compensate for the enormous narcissistic woundopened up by the public display of our physical vulnerability,” so Butler explains

12 Without doubt, it was also the star cast (opened by Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray, followed byBill Irwin, Susan Sarandon, Anthony LaPaglia, Tim Robbins, Swoosie Kurtz, Amy Irving, TomWopat) that greatly enhanced audience appeal (tickets cost $55 – a rather steep price for off-offproductions).

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(ibid.). It did so by seeking to recenter the narrative “I” by shoring up a unilateralaccount of suffering that left the founding values of nationhood intact, evenmobilizing them in its defense, as shown above.13

Nelson’s play is in that regard paradigmatic for the dominant governmentalmedia, as well as the mass cultural response to 9/11. As Marshall Berman ob-served, “Soon afterward, on the screen and then in the street, I heard peopletalking, and they were doing just what I’d done: making enormous mythicalconstructions that would cause the horrific event to revolve around them” (9).14

“It’s about us!” Joan likewise vehemently protests when Argentinean colleaguesattempt to interweave the terrorist attacks of 9/11 with their own suffering underdictatorship. “And they all – they all thought it was about them! But it’s not. It’sabout us!” (48). There is little irony when Joan tentatively adds, “Isn’t it?” (48).This strand of thought, to what extent the pain of New York might be inter-woven with the pain of others, remains unexplored in Nelson’s play. On thecontrary, it is almost with a vengeance that Joan attempts to shore up a pre-9/11identity by concluding her play with a Vonnegut-inspired vision of playing thecatastrophe backwards: towers arising from the ashes, airplanes retreating toBoston, the fire trucks backing off into the station, and the guys returning home(59).15

For Butler as well as for Berman, however, such a unilateral account of traumaprecludes reflection on the interdependency of the vulnerability of the Self withthe vulnerability of its Others. “To be injured,” Judith Butler writes, “means thatone has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of itsdistribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpectedviolence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways” (xii). And she adds con-fidently that reflecting on vulnerability as such might even prompt us to “en-deavor to produce another public culture and policy in which suffering un-expected violence and reactive aggression are not accepted as the norms ofpolitical life” (ibid.). Berman, in a similar manner, suggests that in a moment of

13 In this context it is also worth mentioning that in 2002 The New York Times was awarded thePulitzer Prize for Public Service for its special section “A Nation Challenged,” in which the“Portraits of Grief” were published. See http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2002-Public-Service(Accessed 2 July 2009).

14 This self-centred point of view is also at the heart of a number of popular blockbusters releasedsoon after 9/11, such as Phil Alden Robinson’s Sum of All Fears (2002), where in spite of the totalnuclear destruction of Baltimore by foreign forces, the film closes with a romantic picnic on thelawn in front of the White House (which, although only a mere 40 miles away from Baltimore,inexplicably remains perfectly intact) along with the hero’s (Ben Affleck) wedding proposal to hisgirlfriend that opens up prospects of family life. Consider also the more recent World Trade Center(2006) by Oliver Stone, where for two hours we watch Nicolas Cage and Michael PeÇa engaged inthe most sentimental dialogues concerning their family lives, complete with religious visions.

15 Jonathan Safran Foer engages in exactly the same fantasy in his 9/11 novel Extremely Loud &Incredibly Close (2005).





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collective cataclysm we might want to heed the lesson of Yom Kippur, the JewishDay of Atonement, central to which is the reflection on mass murder. One of theprophetic texts read on that day, Isaiah 58, stresses that reconstruction can beaccomplished only by fulfilling a series of tasks that are not ritual but ethical innature, directed not to God but to other people: sharing bread with the hungry,giving shelter to the homeless, breaking the yokes of bondage. “If you want thepower to rebuild,” Berman concludes, “[y]ou need to learn a whole new structureof feeling” (11). Conversely, an uncritical recentring of the narrative “I” is likelyto lead to military retribution – as evident in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo.

Butler, therefore, insists that “dominant forms of representation can and mustbe disrupted for something about the precariousness of life to be apprehended”(xviii). The important question Butler poses in this regard is how to tell the storyof 9/11 differently, so that the narrative “I” is able to engage a different structureof feeling (to use Berman’s term) and learn to speak from a decentred position (asButler would put it) – and, above all, so that public mourning can be decoupledfrom mimetic violence. What would happen, for instance, she muses, if we wereto begin the story not on September 11, 2001 but earlier so that we couldattempt to decipher the conditions that produced terrorism in the first place; orwhat would happen if we narrated “ourselves not from the first person alone, butfrom, say the position of the third, or to receive an account delivered in thesecond” (8)?

Satirical Interlude

To be sure, there have been more sophisticated and, above all, more self-reflectivetheatrical responses than Nelson’s, which, while not necessarily taking us beyonda unilateral account of suffering, at least ponder the ethical and political im-plications of such a narrative move. Neil LaBute, for instance, seems to be keenlyaware of the ethical implications of such unilateralism, making this the veryfocus of his rather cynical relationship satire The Mercy Seat (2002). As we shallsee, the play functions in many regards as a counter-piece to Nelson’s The Guys.Here LaBute continues the biting satirical work of his earlier “succ�sses descandale” – such as the play Bash (1999) and the film In the Company of Men(1997) – in order to tackle cherished myths of nationhood and to reveal to us thedark underbelly of white, middle-class America.16 The Mercy Seat opened on 26November 2002 at the Manhattan Class Company Theater in New York City –incidentally, with the same actress playing the lead as in the Manhattan pro-duction of Nelson’s play, Sigourney Weaver (this time accompanied by LievSchreiber).

16 For discussion of the function of cruelty in LaBute’s plays see Saal, “’Let’s Hurt Someone.”

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Mercy Seat has often been classified as a work that speaks to 9/11 onlyindirectly; that uses the “Problemgrosspackung 9/11” (the 9/11 problempackage XL) merely as a pretext for a relationship drama (Uka 153).17 However,signs of the catastrophe are ubiquitous throughout the play: “a kind of amberhaze” hangs in the air of Abby’s swanky loft apartment, “a layer of white dust oneverything. Absolutely everything” (LaBute 5). A television set quietly but in-sistently replays images of the collapsing towers, while Ben’s cellphone keeps onringing – a constant reminder that people are still looking for him, that they havenot yet given up hope that he might be alive. The prominence and persistence ofthese tokens of the downtown catastrophe (dust, TV images, cellphones) oughtto alert us that the conflict between Abby and Ben is not simply another variationon the war of the sexes � la August Strindberg or Edward Albee. Instead, I suggestreading it as an allegory of the very process of narrative formation at the momentof ground zero. What kind of story will Ben and Abby create out of this disaster?This is the question hanging in the stifling atmosphere of the play from themoment the curtain rises on Ben sitting “pressed into the corner of one loveseat,staring straight ahead. A cell phone rests in one hand. It rings and rings” (5).

Ironically, it is not the contemplation of catastrophe that has reduced Ben tothis state of apathy but self-pity. Contrary to our indoctrinated faith in theheroism of the common American under duress but very much in line withLaBute’s previous work, Ben’s actions are not marked by altruism or self-sacri-fice. Rather, he sees in 9/11 one thing only: the golden opportunity to disappearamongst the missing so that he can run off with his lover Abby without having tocome clean with his wife and children; he considers it his “meal ticket” (12) to anew life. When Abby protests, “Don’t make this about you. […] don’t make thisthing that’s happened, this whole … unbelievable thing that is going on out thereright now… just about you. Because it’s not. It isn’t,” Ben responds with classicLaButian sarcasm, “Oh, it’s not?” (26). In the character of Ben, LaBute probesthe lack of concern for the feelings of others. This is evident not only in Ben’sreluctance to call his family to let them know that he is okay but also in hisunwillingness to look Abby in the eye while making love to her.

In the character of Abby, LaBute seems to assert an ethical counter-force toBen’s narcissism. It is she who insists on talking about the downtown cataclysmin order to probe Ben’s moral stance towards it : “I just wanted to be clear aboutwhere you and I stand about this thing” (13). “Let ’em know you’re alive, do thatmuch! Quit hiding in my loft and do the right thing!” she finally demands (43).And yet, it quickly becomes clear that Abby is just as caught up in the apathy ofBen’s “whatever” philosophy (17). While ranting about Ben’s lack of empathy,

17 See also Ben Bratley, who argues that the play might be set at the edge of the “vacuum left by thetwin towers,” but it “really occurs in one of those feverish nights of the soul in which men andwomen lock in vicious sexual combat” (“Yes, He Survived Sept. 11,” 5).





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she, too, lets the opportunity slip by to assist a woman with putting up flyers ofthe missing:

BEN: So, did you help her?ABBY: What?BEN: I’m saying, did you help her out at all? Taping the signs up or anything?ABBY: No, I didn’t. I had the … groceries and everything … but umm … I was just trying to… (15)

When asked by Ben to throw in her lot with him completely, to run off togetherand build a genuine relationship, Abby hesitates – not, however, out of ethicalconcerns but for her own selfish reasons: “And my seniority at work now? Mypension plan and all the things I’ve worked toward, I should just …” (60).

LaBute’s upper-middle-class Manhattanites clearly have little in commonwith the plethora of ordinary heroes we encounter in Nelson and the Times’“Portraits.” In fact, they have lost the very concept of the “heroic.” When Abbyteases Ben by referring to Audie Murphy, insisting that “He was a hero,” Benasks: “A what?”; and Abby replies: “Ha! (She laughs). You don’t even recognizethe word” (24).18 As in most LaBute pieces, ethical consciousness has here beenreduced to a vague something called “the morality thing” (130), replaced largelyby the characters’ “whatever” philosophy (“Yep, that’s us. ‘Whatever.’” 17). Yet,as LaBute also makes clear, Ben and Abby are no “cutthroat pirates of the highseas” (31) but in their moral vacuousness perceive themselves as ordinaryAmericans, who are simply “trying to muddle through” (31). “I always take theeasy route, do it faster, simpler, you know whatever it takes to get it done, beliked, get by,” Ben admits. “That’s me. Cheated in school, screwed over myfriends, took whatever I could get from whomever I could take it from” (32).19 Inthe end, Ben nonetheless considers himself “okay” – an attribute he considers“not so bad. It’s pretty fucking underrated actually” (47). As several reviewersattest, “against our natural instincts, we empathize with his plight” (Isherwood,“Mercy Seat” 30).20

With his bleak view of human behavior in a moment of collective crisis,LaBute challenges the prominent assertion of heroic national narratives by onceagain unmasking the ordinary cruelty of the common American anti-hero. WithThe Mercy Seat, he also pushes beyond the CNN rhetoric of “tragedy,” “ca-lamity,” and “moral abyss” (12), showing that this moral abyss has been in-

18 Audie Murphy was one of the most highly decorated American soldiers of World War II. He wasalso a well-known film actor starring in numerous Westerns as well as in the autobiographical warfilm To Hell and Back (1955), which became very popular at the time.

19 Ben’s statement echoes Willy Loman’s “Be liked, and you shall not want”-philosophy. See ArthurMiller, Death of a Salesman (1949).

20 Elysa Gardner of USAToday similarly claims that thanks to Liev Schreiber’s performance, “We feelfor Ben even as we recognize that his suffering is selfish and self-inflicted” (“Riveting PerformancesLift,” 11).

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grained in the American psyche all along. Ultimately, so the play asserts, 9/11 didnot change a thing with regard to the nation’s solipsism: “[Y]ou honestly don’tthink we’re gonna rebound from this?” Ben asks. “And I don’t just mean you andme, I am saying the country as a whole. Of course we will. We’ll do whatever ittakes, go after whomever we need to, call out the tanks and shit, but we’re gonnahave the World Series, and Christmas, and all the other crap that you can counton in life” (16, italics his).

While garnering mixed reviews, a number of critics nonetheless found “plentyof cold truth” (Isherwood, “Mercy Seat” 30) in LaBute’s analysis of the impact ofcatastrophe on the nation’s consciousness. “There was a brief moment afterSept. 11, 2001, in which much hope was expressed that the tragedy would makeus less frivolous, less selfish people,” Ed Siegel of The Boston Globe writes. “Allone has to do is tune to ‘The Apprentice’ or ‘Survivor’ to realize that LaBute wasprescient of the superficiality of American concerns” (1). And Charles Isher-wood of Variety wonders, “If his opportunism is one extreme reaction, and theheroism of the firefighters and others who gave themselves in the aftermath ofthe tragedy is at the other end of the spectrum, where do the rest of us fall? Howfar removed is Ben’s selfishness from the sympathetic onlooker who feels anguishfor a day or two, then moves on?” (“Mercy Seat” 30).

In this regard, Mercy Seat was a welcome “hard, cold slap in the face” (Siegel1). It takes an unflinching look at what LaBute describes as “the ‘ground zero’ ofour lives, that gaping hole in ourselves that we try to cover up with clothes fromthe Gap, with cologne from Ralph Lauren, with handbags from Kate Spade”(Mercy Seat x). And yet, in the end, LaBute’s riposte to Nelson does not really digdeeper than the latter’s affirmative discourse. Even though highly critical of whathe diagnoses as an intrinsic narcissism of the American common man, he doesnot move beyond such rather pessimistic assessment. In the end, neither Nelsonnor LaBute budges from the unilateral perspective. The difference between theirtwo responses to 9/11 is that between ideological blindness and sober cynicism;both of them, however, remain embedded in a unilateral account of suffering.

From Conflictual Violence to Ritualistic Mimesis

With Karen Finley’s 2003 performance piece Make Love the American theatertakes a first step into the direction of Butler’s hoped-for ethics of vulnerability.After much struggle to find a venue for her performance, the piece finally openedin the summer of 2003 in the small cabaret space of The Cutting Room on West24th Street in New York (later moving to the Fez Caf� on Lafayette Street). BenBratley described it as a “messy, silly, upsetting, sometimes funny and surpris-ingly moving love poem to a place and its people in a time of crisis” (“Riffs on 9/





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11” 3).21 Impersonating Liza Minnelli “in song, dance, glamour, and glitter”(53), Finley offers up an allegorical icon – Liza as the quintessential New Yorkersinging and dancing her way through every crisis – as a point of identificationand stand-in for distressed New Yorkers struggling to make sense of it all. “The‘divaness’ of Liza […] becomes the place to throw our pathos, hilarity, mockeryand taboos about 9/11 and the current chaos of the nation” (ibid.).

In this “messy, silly” performance, two structuring techniques stand out:Bakhtinian heteroglossia and the Girardian scapegoating ritual. In what follows,I shall show by enabling the taking up of the decentred position of vulnerabilityand by forfeiting narrative closure these techniques allow for a different narrativeframing of collective trauma than seen so far – one that allows for the trans-formation of conflictual mimesis into ritualistic mimesis.

First of all, Finley’s performance presents us with a medley of different voicesand stories: sad stories about loss (a construction worker watching the disasterfrom Brooklyn and running to the rescue of his daughter in Manhattan); ahumorous riff on the paranoia and self-righteousness of New Yorkers after 9/11(“Hello, can you please help me? I am in a state of terror in high alert – I am in thestate of Mid-America,” 63); as well as a biting political satire of the Bushadministration’s mounting jingoism (“I had done all the shopping I could for mycountry,” 64) and repressive homeland security (here presented in inimitableFinley fashion as “national bondage” and S&M fantasy, 60). In an homage toBilly Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Finley, moreover, reminds us that burned bodiesare not the trademarks of foreign terrorists alone (66).22 All this is interspersedwith various songs and melodies, beginning with a medley of American wartunes and ending with a moving rendition of John Denver’s “Leaving on a JetPlane,” which here comes to stand as a eulogy to all those who did not return onSeptember 11.

I want to suggest that this formal polyphony of song, narrative, and per-formance, this collage of eulogy, satire, and storytelling, functions similar towhat Mikhail Bakhtin has described as heteroglossia in the novel, where “thedistinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, thismovement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dis-persion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia” (263) bring aboutthe dialogization of the performance. As Bakhtin’s translator and editor MichaelHolquist explains, with the term dialogism, Bakhtin sought to describe theconstant interaction and mutual conditioning of meanings in the novel. When “aword, discourse, language or culture undergoes ‘dialogization’,” it also becomes“relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things”

21 Bratley also declared it to be “the most emotionally engaging September 11 play” of the year. SeeBratley and Bruce Weber, “Iffy Scores and a Shortage of Lust,” 3.

22 Elsewhere in the performance, Finley also reminds us of the Mai Lai Massacre (66).

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(Holquist in Bakhtin 427). “Undialogized” language, by contrast, is author-itative and absolute (ibid.). In its radical dialogization of the narrative framing of9/11, Finley opens up a new epistemological mode for understanding trauma:one in which the distinctive links and interrelationships between various ut-terances and forms enter into an open-ended dialogue. As Finely describes herproject, by shuttling back and forth between voices of love, envy, hatred andgrief, she sought to capture the confusion of the moment, the “confusion inAmerican politics at the time, the confusion about being an American, and theloaded implication of being against, or being for the war” (52).

The heteroglossia is further enhanced by the presence of multiple Lizacharacters : in addition to Finley herself, several musicians and co-performers(including Finley’s daughter) are dressed up in Minnelli drag. To Finley, themultiple Minnelli impersonations embody New York’s “multipersonality dis-order (the neurotic tendencies of self-obsession)” (53). And it was these tensionsthat she sought to discharge by her performance. “A way to control the fear is totransfer the emotion to an imaginary creature,” Finley explains (ibid.). Liza, inher various incarnations, served as this “method of displacement” (ibid.).23

Finley here understands her role as performer very much in the tradition ofwhat Ren� Girard has described as scape-goating ritual. In the persona ofMinnelli offers herself up as a surrogate for the fears, anxieties, and antipathiesthat have been haunting New Yorkers since the attacks, so that they can bereleased and channeled into mourning. “My body has 3,000 people dusted onme,” she declares (62). And she describes her project as collecting the pain of herspectators, so that her drag performance of Liza becomes “a safety zone inbetween our dangerous feelings and our neurotic defenses; it saves the audiencefrom feeling hysterical paralysis response” (53) as well as from “a hatred onewants to avoid” (53). Although Finley’s Minnelli is not immolated in the end inthe traditional sense of what Girard describes as the scapegoating ritual, shenonetheless performs a similar function. Throughout the performance, she givesvoice to individual fears of “personal childhood terrors of abandonment andabuse” alongside the collective fears ingrained in the very concept of Americannationhood and abused by its leaders (60). Moreover, with great acuity she

23 There is an interesting parallel between Finley’s treatment of trauma in this performance and thatof Art Spiegelman in his graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). Like Finley, Spiegelmanuses formal heteroglossia and methods of displacement: the interweaving of the recent trauma,biting political satires of the Bush administration, the combination of his own cartoon imageswith that of historical cartoons, and finally, the repeated substitution of the human face with theface of a mouse (an explicit reference to Spiegelman’s earlier graphic novels Maus I and II, dealingwith the Holocaust). Andreas Huyssen has described this complex layering of polyphony andsubstitutions as “mimetic approximation” – a metaphorical way of dealing with trauma thatacknowledges the inaccessibility of the actual experience of pain, while simultaneously enabling aself-conscious narrative framing that highlights “closeness and distance, similitude and differ-ence.” See Huyssen, “Of Mice and Mimesis,” 70.





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identifies Bush as the monstrous double of Saddam: “WHEN BUSH TALKSABOUT SADAAM [sic] HE TALKS ABOUT HIMSELF SADDAM HUS-SEIN IS HIS SHADOW SADAAM HUSSEIN IS HIM HE IS THE MANWITH THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION WHO IS OUT OFCONTROL HURTING HIS OWN PEOPLE IN ORDER TO BE POTENTHAS TO BE ON THE BRINK OF WAR […]” (60 –61, capitals in original).That Finley recognizes mimetic rivalry at the heart of the current crisis ofdisorder, transgression, and omnipresent conflictual violence becomes mostevident when she speaks about “The tension of the violence – the fear I recognizeTHE FEAR I SMELL” (60).

As Girard reminds us, when “[a]t the very height of the crisis violence be-comes simultaneously the instrument, object, and all-inclusive subject of desire,”violence needs to be transmuted into culture: “This is why social coexistencewould be impossible if no surrogate victim existed” (“From Mimetic Desire”77). Finley/Minnelli offers herself up as such surrogate victim. At the end of herperformance she slowly overturns the silver bags that she had brought earlier asgift-wraps for wine bottles. “An orange light projects the shadow of the Towers”(67) as she begins her final eulogy, entitled “Our Unbearable Grief Our Un-bearable Sorrow”: “So, as I learned from the Irish / As we drink at our wake of thedead/ Please keep the Apple in your eyes/ By toasting her today / […] / Butremember this is hard for her / She is not used to being comforted / Take herhand and comfort her / I will let you comfort me” (68). In this eulogy, “un-bearable grief ” is transformed into mourning – a mourning that is short andcathartic: “And I will try not to cry too long / I promise” (ibid.). It is a mourningthat disrupts the mimetic violence enacted in her earlier “projections as a nationliving with fear” about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Saddam (60).

“Real or symbolic,” Girard writes, “sacrifice is primarily a collective action ofthe entire community, which purifies itself of its own disorder through theunanimous immolation of a victim, but this can happen only at the paroxysm ofthe ritual crisis” (“Mimesis and Violence” 11). The price of such collectivepurification is the symbolic immolation of the sacrificial victim – in this case theartist. In her epilogue, Finley recounts a dream she had of a huge skyscrapercrashing and collapsing. “It was filled with artists and art from all continents,from cultures all over the world. It was a U.N. of creativity of expression. Everyartist was given a plot to create a work of art on. Now, I associate and I see thatevery artist was given a grave to create a work of art on. Then the building cametumbling down and that skyscraper was you” (69).

The fusion of Finley with Minnelli into Finelli, then, becomes an effectivemechanism for gathering, inhabiting as well as defusing the various voices andstories that have been crisscrossing the wound in downtown Manhattan so thatthey do not build up to mimetic violence. Rather, as the artist requests of heraudience, “Please can you kiss?” (63). The collective kiss-in, during which “[t]he

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Lizas start kissing and hugging the audience” (63), is a powerful assertion of oneof theater’s most crucial function in times of crisis ; namely, as Girard has de-scribed it, the transformation of conflictual mimesis into ritualistic mimesis,creative and protective rather than destructive in nature (“From Mimetic Desire”88).

In conclusion, it also needs to be noted that the synecdochic claim of poly-phony (“My body has 3,000 people dusted on me”) as well as its visual renditionin the multiple Liza impersonations highlights the Whitmanesque tension in-herent in the project of embodying various voices in one single allegorical body:“Do I contradict myself ? Very well, then, I am large, I contain multitudes,”Whitman sings. Yet, the “I” that emerges through Finelli is no longer the “I” ofthe common man that Whitman celebrates, Nelson heroizes, and LaBute con-demns. Rather, it is a self that is capable of inhabiting the position of vulner-ability, that in engaging the heteroglossia of its various composite parts is inconstant flux and changing. It is an “I” that is also a “she” and “you” – to take upthe pronouns that Finley is deploying in the final eulogy as well as the pronounsthat Butler asks us to consider in our narrative account of trauma.

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"It's About Us! Violence and Narrative Memory in Post 9/11 American Theater." Arcadia

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