viz. - September 11

Processing Extraordinary Tragedy in Ordinary Days

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 13:00:00 +0000

[Spoiler alert: if you are fortunate enough to have the opportunity of attending Ordinary Days, know that the following describes much of the play’s ending.]

Manalive, the novel by G.K. Chesterton, opens with miraculous gust of wind, a meterological phenomenon described as “the good wind that blows nobody harm.” I always found something particularly memorable about that image of a moment of impossible happiness, and it gusted into my mind once more when I attended the recent Austin production of the chamber musical, Ordinary Days.

Ordinary Days offers more than a miraculous gust of wind. Instead, its climax brings all four of the play’s cast members into contact by a single, bizarre spectacle. The image is explicitly identified not with nature, however, but with one of the greatest recent tragedies of our nation: the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11. I’m not sure that the play’s treatment of 9/11 is necessarily its most brilliant moment—but it does offer an interesting example of one artist’s attempt to use visual and narrative imagination to recontextualize the image that has driven so much of America’s foreign and domestic policy over the last ten years.

The play starts off, it seems, as about as unpolitical as a story could. Jason is moving in with his girlfriend Claire, wondering whether he can find a place for himself in her apartment and heart. Meanwhile, cheerfully optimistic (if profoundly unambitious) artist Warren finds the dissertation notes of neurotic grad-student (but I repeat myself) Deb, starting a delightful odd-couple friendship. Everyone, naturally, has his or her own problem. Claire struggles to clean out the clutter of her past in order to make room for Jason. Deb is still running away from her childhood in “like, a suburb of a suburb,” but finding that the overwhelming anonymity of New York (not to mention the inflexibility of her dissertation advisor) don’t live up to her big-town imagination. The male characters are simpler: Jason yearns to move forward in his relationship with Claire, while Warren finds a simple pleasure in trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to hand out flyers covered with motivational sayings.

Warren and Deb. Ahh, what delicious awkwardness. Image credit: Kimberly Mead

The events on 9/11 are evoked near the end of the musical, after Claire rejected Jason’s marriage proposal. Deb and Warren are contemplating the city from a friend’s high-rise apartment, contemplating their insignificance, the fact that they will “never stand as tall as these buildings.” On a whim, Warren decides to cast his flyers to the street below. Reeling from a disastrous meeting with her dissertation advisor, Deb adds pages from her dissertation to the impromptu confetti. New Yorkers gather, with quite understandable anxiety to see their day disrupted by a sight no one could have predicted. Walking beneath the paper explosion, Claire sees “this storm cloud of papers fall down from the sky,” triggering her (and the audience) to re-live her own traumatic memories. Claire calls Jason and, in perhaps the show’s most powerful number, recounts her whirlwind romance with her first husband. This love story ended, as so many stories did, on September 11, 2001.

Image credit: Kimberly Mead

The reaction to 9/11 involved many responses: anger, fear, the sort of “quiet, unyielding anger” that I shared with George W. Bush and that lead us to two perhaps ill-advised wars, unimaginable abridgment of our civil liberties, and a drone program where Americans and foreigners are systematically killed with very little in the way of due process or civilian oversight. But Ordinary Days, for a moment, brought out other memories of the day: the sense of helplessness, the sense that everything has changed, the sense of horrified vertigo of looking up, and feeling like the bottom of my life had dropped out.

There is something appropriate, then, to seeing two characters throw their obsessions out the window of a skyscraper. If Ordinary Days is, as Warren puts it, “an almost, not-quite, New York sort of fairy-tale,” the scene functions as a through-the-looking-glass echo of the disaster that inspired it. Yes, Deb and Warren see their plans, their imagined careers, and much of their identities swirl away. Yet watching words drift to the ground like shards of glass and steel, Claire hallucinates her previous husband’s voice: “hey, you’re allowed to move on. It’s okay.” That is all the permission she needs to accept Jason’s proposal, and accept the hopeful ending we want from our musicals. But maybe, just perhaps, Ordinary Days offers a way of simultaneously recognizing the events of our recent history, and developing a healthier reaction to the tragedy. Maybe then we can cross, as Jason sings in the play’s third song, “all this space between / the moment we’re in and what’s lying ahead.”

9/11 Report -- Graphic Novel vs. Authorized Edition

Nate Kreuter — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 23:39:25 +0000

Students in my Rhetoric of Spying Class recently read sections of the 9/11 Commission Report, along with the graphic novel version of the report (for a thorough discussion of the graphic novel version and its critics, including some great links, click here).

Reactions to the graphic novel were mixed, and more students were critical of the graphic novel version than I expected. I was also surprised by why many of the students were critical of the graphic novel. Rather than argue that it was irreverent towards the events of 9/11, many argued that the graphic novel obscured too many of the Authorized Edition's more detailed points. I'm not sure whether the students really thought this or were telling me what they thought I wanted to hear. (I personally can see a lot of advantages in the graphic novel version, such as audience accessibility, which my students also pointed out.)

At any rate, I think that comparisons of related written and visual texts can be very productive in the rhetoric/comp classroom. If you are an instructor or teacher with a story about an a similarly comparative exercise you'd like to share, we'd love to hear about it in the comments section.

There's Enargeia and then there's Enargeia

Brett Ommen — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:50:22 +0000

Over at No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman pieced together a rather precise visual argument by sequencing a series of images from 9/11 and the war in Iraq. While we could spend many a blog entry on the imagery of terror and war or on the function of visual images in argument, the Hariman sequence seems to provide an excellent in-class opportunity to dwell on the different persuasive registers present in visual communication and political speeches that invoke the same imagery.

Hariman’s sequence is as follows: 1) the moment of the second plane impact at the WTC, 2) President Bush as Air Force pilot, 3) the infamous Abu Ghraib photograph, 4) a photograph of (presumably) a former American soldier and his 3 prosthetic limbs, 5) the wreckage of a Baghdad neighborhood, and 6) the wreckage and casualties of a Tikrit car bombing. Images 1, 3, 4, and 6 are particularly disturbing. But seeing these images and hearing them brought up in speech are two very different experiences. It would not shock anyone, I don’t think, to hear a U.S. politician reference the plane attacks of the WTC, or to speak of a former solider dealing with the physical and emotional fallout of war, or to call attention to the violence and loss of life of street violence in Baghdad. And yet the violence of the images in the No Caption Needed post seems much more acute, potentially offensive, and may even execute a metonymic kind of violence on the viewer. This may make images more effective in imparting the emotional register of public memory, but a counterpoint to that utility is that speech offers a type of protection against the pathos of those images. I offer the contrast between visual reminders and vocal reminders, in part to show how the visual might refuse a kind of whitewashing that is possible in non-visual discourse. More importantly, I think comparing and contrasting the No Caption Needed sequence to other discourses on the public memory of 9/11 and the war on terror is an exercise that can create a more precise account of the virtues and limits of visual rhetoric in general.

viz. - September 11

Processing Extraordinary Tragedy in Ordinary Days

9/11 Report -- Graphic Novel vs. Authorized Edition

There's Enargeia and then there's *Enargeia*

There's Enargeia and then there's Enargeia