Mourning Absences, Melancholic Commemoration, and the Contested Public Memories of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum

Abstract

This essay extends the interdisciplinary work that exists on the dialectic between mourning and melancholia as a way of analyzing the rhetorical effect of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. We argue that while previous research on this site has often underscored the reverential and mourning functions of this space, few have studied the darker, more melancholic features of these hallowed grounds. By investigating the melancholic dimensions of public memory, and by illustrating how national communities can strategically take advantage of these dimensions, we affirm the importance of resilience, mourning, and recovery for commemorative efforts.

Keywords:

• 9/11 Memorial and Museum
• Melancholia
• Melancholic Commemoration
• Mourning
• Rhetoric of Absence
• Trauma

Notes

^1. Technically, during the first visit during the summer of 2012, this place of remembrance was not yet the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum because the Memorial Museum was not yet open. The second visit, however, during the summer of 2014, included a tour of both the 9/11 Memorial and the Memorial Museum.

^2. Costing over $1 billion, the National 9/11 Memorial would end up being one of the most expensive memorials in U.S. history, and the staggering $63 million annual operational costs (Haberman, 2014; 9/11 Memorial, 2014; Schuppe, 2014) provided empirical evidence that American communities were willing to tolerate this type of spending in the name of national mourning. Travelers who took the pilgrimage in the summer of 2012 found that they needed tickets to enter this urban space, and millions have now visited this site.

^3. Water in the memorial, for example, could be linked to Christian sacrament, and its primal ritual washing function could also be tied to Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Shinto, Taoism, or Islam. Visitors of all ascetic backgrounds might identify with the rhetoric of rebirth (Burke, 1970), and this underscored the redemptive capacities of the memorial’s “reflection pools.” Denson (2011) remarked that the “waterfalls and reflecting pools are hypnotic, inducing the calm necessary for contemplation and spirituality” (p. 10).