The Glass Bowl of Memory: Plotting 1993 at the National 9/11 Memorial Museum

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"It seems to be a condition about the future that one should assume one's own time to stand in an extraordinary relation to it. The time is not free, it is the slave of a mythical end." - Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

Situated underneath what was formerly the World Trade Center's North Tower, the National 9/11 Memorial Museum's three-part "Historical Exhibition" is ruled by the timeline. Visitors move through the exhibition as one might trace the contours of a giant ampersand - clockwise through the inner rooms of the "Part 1: Events of the Day" timeline, and then spiraling back around in the opposite direction through the final two parts, marked on museum placards as "BEFORE 9/11" and "AFTER 9/11." In Part 1 chronology prevails, organizing the viewer's experience almost down to the minute. Of course, the predominance of the timeline marked along the walls belies the complexity of the multiple, overlapping chronologies that actually come to structure the entire historical exhibit.

All minutes are not created equal in the museum's "September 11, 2001" narrative. Privileged moments from the day (8:46 AM, 9:03 AM, 9:37 AM, 9:59 AM, 10:03 AM, 10:28 AM) distend the timeline; they contain more artifacts and evidence, unfolding more slowly for contemporary museum-goers. But in addition to being expanded and compressed, the overall "timeline" gets broken when, after the "Events of the Day" section ends at 11:50 PM, visitors to the museum are transported back in time to Part 2, a comparatively truncated gallery that "chronicles the events leading up to 9/11, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing."1 This break exemplifies a peculiar tension at work in the museum, between the desire for linear continuity and the valorization of the exceptional temporal instant that rendered everything "before" or "after."

The sudden rupture in the museum's overall layout from "during" to "before" to "after" demands close attention because it breaks with an otherwise dominant impulse to re-enact events in sequence. But it is also notable for the ways in which the particular content of the museum's pre-9/11 world shapes our understanding of its greater narrative. Part 1 of the timeline evinces a distinct desire for verisimilitude, for viewers who weren't there on September 11, 2001 to experience the day as it was (albeit, compressed to an experience of 45 minutes - the suggested "average" time it takes to meander through the exhibit). In contrast, Part 2 occupies a single hallway in which the whole history of "before 9/11" is compressed and divided into four subdivided rooms: "Landmark and Icon," "The 1993 Bombing," "Rise of al-Qaeda," and "The Plot Comes to America." Together those four rooms cobble together the story of how a prominent national landmark was, according to a prominently displayed museum placard, "the target of terrorism not once, but twice." In a space otherwise dedicated almost entirely to the exceptionality of "9/11," the brief inclusion of 1993 reveals at least a partial interest in thinking about 9/11 as something that was neither as singular as the dominant public discourse would suggest, nor without concrete historical "causes." At the same time, though, the museum obscures the links between the 1993 and 2001 attacks, ultimately positioning the story of 9/11 as a closure narrative and implying that 9/11 can be understood as the culmination of a plot that we could have predicted back in 1993.

The way in which the 1993 attacks are presented within the museum's chronology demands careful consideration because it seems to be less about elucidating geopolitical links (which one would expect in a historical exhibition) and more about speculating about almost arbitrary coincidences, such as the use of a laptop in 1993 "[foreshadowing] the 9/11 plot," promoting a narrative in which the more difficult questions about the historical causes of the attacks are elided. By narratively situating 2001 as both a result of 1993 and its belated apotheosis, the museum discursively puts visitors in the position of "knowing," of thinking of 2001 as what Frank Kermode calls "a mythical end." The particular way in which the 1993 attacks are emphasized ends up transmuting what seems to be the experience of shock or trauma into an iteration of narrative "closure," where 1993 suddenly makes sense as a precursor or even a cause of 2001, as opposed to a random act of violence that refuses assimilation into any narrative. But a comforting, cohesive narrative is precisely what emerges from this break in the timeline that positions 1993 between 9/11 and "After 9/11," a epochal narrative embodied in the prevalence of "plot" words on the information placards - "foreshadowed," "from that point forward," "the 9/11 plot," and so on.

In what follows, I focus exclusively on the first two rooms in the "before 9/11" section because they exemplify (albeit in two very different ways) how the museum's ostensibly comprehensive timeline is less about "what happened" and more about promoting a codified narrative of closure, distinctly at odds with the way in which the museum invites visitors to re-experience the events of the day through its "Events of the Day" timeline. This is not to say that the latter two rooms in Part 2 offer anything close to a comprehensive history of "the events leading up to 9/11," but they do at least offer visitors a timeline of the specific plot to carry out the 9/11 attacks, culminating with the hijackers boarding the airplanes. In contrast, "the 1993 Bombing" room seems comparatively dislocated from the historical exhibit's more customary teleology, and, even more glaringly, the first room bears almost no causal relationship to the attack narrative, save for the vague manner in which it identifies the towers as "landmarks" and, therefore, prominent targets.

Significantly, the transition into Part 2 feels particularly jarring due to the radical shift in the museum's otherwise uniform aesthetic, characterized throughout by what Adam Gopnik calls "theatricalized gloom."2 But upon exiting "Part 1: Events of the Day," where the galleries are all dark and poorly lit, museum-goers suddenly find themselves in that first brightly-lit room with yellow walls, plastered from floor to ceiling with jubilant images of the twin towers from 1980s and 1990s film posters and magazine covers. Given the museum's apparent commitment to an otherwise linear narrative, the experience of suddenly ending up "before" the "after" feels incongruous in its own right. But the fact that this break in the timeline coincides with a drastic aesthetic and affective shift - the entry into what might easily get mistaken for a circa September 10, 2001 gift shop - raises broader questions not just about the museum's peculiar temporal logic but about its ideological nature. What might we make of the way in which the museum-goer's entry to the historical past is actualized through this homage to the towers as readily co-opted icons?

In Battle for Ground Zero, Elizabeth Greenspan offers a detailed account about why the historical component accounting for the "Rise of al-Qaeda" constitutes such a relatively small portion of the overall exhibition: since the museum is a memorial museum, its curators were concerned that the inclusion of perpetrators would undermine its essential mandate. But in the first two rooms of the "before 9/11" section, the historical component isn't just minimized; it is almost entirely supplanted by nostalgic fantasy. This happens in two ways, exemplified by each of the first two rooms in the exhibit. In the "nostalgia room," viewers are submerged in a fantastical vision of the pre-9/11 world, one that was already an object of fanciful longing before 9/11. The towers in this vision work as a motif for a larger symbolic loss, not of a sense of American impenetrability but of a dreamy way of life we'd already lost (or never had). In the "the 1993 Bombing" room, the museum perpetuates a fantasy of preparedness and swift recovery that obscures the geopolitical links between the two attacks and imposes, instead, a contrived narrative in which the shock of unimaginable violence gets naturalized as part of a "national destiny" plot. Both rooms epitomize the museum's paradoxical temporal logic, denoted in a layout that attempts to both situate viewers in history (as if they are experiencing it unfold) and to position them in such a way as to offer a coherent sense of an epoch, encapsulated.

Like the unobtrusive image of the perpetrators later in the exhibit, the placard identifying the name of the strange yellow room of souvenirs is minimized; just above floor level, obscured on the side of a column, hangs an easily overlooked sign that says, "Landmark and Icon." Manifesting a nostalgia that perhaps cannot (or should not) be named, the entire room is anonymous on the official map, marked only as an empty square. The space is an homage to a pre-traumatic world, in which recurrent images of the twin towers line the walls, graphically inserted into the background of movie posters advertising Working Girl (1988) and New York Stories (1989); rendered in cartoon form for the 1994 New York City Marathon poster and covers of the New Yorker magazine from 1982, 1999, and 2000; captured in photographic panoramas for promotional materials - notably three prints for Image Works Communications from 1996 depicting the view from the top of the South Tower across a city whose reputation as the gateway to hell in Ghostbusters 2 had recently given way to the apparent prosperity of the late 1990s. Display cases feature rows of postcards and keepsakes, towers in miniature, towers as the backdrop of wedding pictures posted to the digital archives by the people who had taken them. In another stark contrast to the rest of the museum, this space has no audible recordings, no witness testimonies projected from otherwise ubiquitous speakers. Large benches line two entire walls, inviting visitors to sit down comfortably for the first time since entering the Historical Exhibition. The noiseless space of potential repose is suspended somewhere between a longing for the time of "before 9/11" and a site of transgression, where I noticed visitors to the museum checking their phones, taking a break to sit down, and breathing a sigh of relief.

This bizarre space of retromania, in which the fictionalized renderings of the towers appear almost identical despite the passage of decades, functions within the museum as a kind of affective waiting room, in which museum-goers are suspended between abstracted ways of feeling about loss (lost time, lost values, lost emblems), rather than an ostensibly discernible world of "Before 9/11" and a world of "After 9/11." The text on the wall describes how the towers were an "icon of New York City's audacity and vitality, seen as "a symbol of America itself - a place of possibility and dreams that defied limitation." Nothing is mentioned, of course, of the decades of criticism that architect Minoru Yamasaki faced for his design before the towers were culturally recuperated as part of the late 20^th century renaissance of the Financial District.3 While one wouldn't expect the museum to speak ill of the departed, the commitment to the World Trade Center as "Landmark and Icon" testifies to the unreality of the Twin Towers, displayed like butterflies on pins in a collection of memorabilia. The room creates for viewers a graspable nostalgia that reveals the museum's fundamental and unconscious logic, its appeal to the time capsule, to history that can be contained.

The best example of this, which stands in the center of the room, is a glass box prominently displaying Yamasaki's architectural model of the Twin Towers. As described by the memorial museum's chief of staff, Allison Blais, "[Yamasaki's] last known large-scale World Trade Center Model now stands in the Museum as a memory of the past, evoking nostalgia for a landmark forever gone from the skyline. But it also takes us back to a time before the Twin Towers existed, when models like these stood not as reminders of a tragic moment in our nation's history but as promises for a brighter, more hopeful future."4 When we encounter the small-scale model of the Twin Towers at the center of the memorabilia room, we remember them as we experience them here: contained in a glass box, consumable, already rendered in the global imaginary as an eternal tourist tchotchke or snow globe.5 The model, while too big to take with us, represents the same commodification and miniaturization of the city at work in the souvenir objects that rendered the late 20^th century New York skyline co-optable, shrunk to a symbol in a way that voids the possibility of any "real" historical touch.  Surrounded by the evidence of a "pre-9/11 world," Yamasaki's model offers up a perfect heyday as the only thing that could have possibly existed "before 9/11." It is certainly a space of loss, but a "good" loss - the feel-good "end of an era" kind of loss that comes to supplant the actual destruction of the towers on September 11, 2001. Furthermore, the focus on the towers as a symbol of the nation's promise means that we haven't, in fact, lost anything at all; after 9/11 the absent towers came to occupy the same symbolic position, evidence of New York's vitality and the nation's resilience. The feeling of pride remains, the burning pile or the space of absence its new emblem.

Copyright 2004-2011, National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center Foundation, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The room and its various containers exemplify the kind of temporal "containment" prevalent throughout the museum, which attempts (perhaps irreconcilably) to act as both a storehouse and catalyst for memory. Fundamentally, the way in which the museum contains time, so to speak, accords with a fantasy of narrative closure that works against its desire for historical verisimilitude. This paradox is most apparent in both the web and museum gallery version of "the 1993 Bombing" timeline. While almost none of the objects in the "Landmark and Icon" room appear in the museum's long established "Interactive Timeline" which, in the years leading up to the museum's May 2014 opening, allowed people to virtually explore its artifacts, the 1993 attacks recently came to occupy a privileged position on that site, offering another opportunity to think about the museum's work of temporal containment. Designed to coincide with the twenty-second anniversary of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing this past February, the new addition of the "1993 WTC Bombing Timeline" to the web-based timeline situates the 1993 attacks as part of a broader narrative of "9/11," in line with museum president Joe Daniels' that "9/11 is part of a larger story that started before 9/11."6 That story, if we go by the web timeline, begins on April 4, 1973, with the dedication of the World Trade Center, includes "September 11, 2001," and ends on "February 26, Every Year" with the annual memorial service honoring the six victims of the 1993 attack, whose names are also included in the annual commemorative ceremonies honoring the 2,977 victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The implication of a timeline "ending" with a repeating ceremony seems to situate the events as both inside and outside the imposed framework of the timeline itself - something that potentially makes room for a self-reflexive critique of the timeline's fictive strictures. However, inside the museum, these overlapping times of mourning end up being absorbed into the singular "event" of "9/11" as they are bounded by the walls of the "September 11, 2001 Historical Exhibition."

I am interested, in particular, in the ways in which the 1993 attacks are subsumed into the museum's "September 11, 2001" exhibition in a move that seems to exceed Marc Redfield's critique of the imperialistic co-opting of the name-date "September 11" as an act that "imposes knowledge and amnesia, knowledge as amnesia."7 That the names of the six victims of the 1993 attacks should be included in the 9/11 Memorial was taken as a given in the memorial design mission statement, but their inclusion is at odds with a temporally delineated "9/11" story, privileging, instead, a diachronic attention to "Ground Zero" as a central locus for national commemorative efforts and nationalist mobilization. Given the "contentious process"8 through which the memorial took shape, the inclusion of the 1993 attacks seemed remarkably uncontested, particularly given the general emphasis on 9/11 as a moment in time that instantiated a radical break from the previous epoch. As Redfield has pointed out, both "Ground Zero" and "9/11" are disputable terms because of the ways in which they overwrite those other Ground Zeros and September 11's of historical significance, and because they efface elements of their own history; "Ground Zero" discursively limits the scope of the attacks to downtown Manhattan while "9/11" compresses the ever-expanding time of national trauma to a single day. For the latter reason, in particular, the inclusion of 1993 within a space called the National September 11 Memorial Museum seems to have received much less attention than it deserves.

Ultimately, the museum's particular emphasis on the name-date (the incorporation of 1993 into "September 11") speaks to the situation of "Ground Zero" as a redoubled site of commemorative attention that, like Elyn Zimmerman's granite memorial to the 1993 victims destroyed in the 2001 attacks, is always at risk of being subsumed by something bigger and worse. Described on the official website as a "relic," the sole surviving fragment of the Zimmerman's memorial works as a doubly commemorative object, but one that obscures the specificity of the dead. In the museum, a placard mentions how the original memorial commemorating the six individuals who perished in the 1993 attacks was subsumed by the wreckage of the Twin Towers in 2001, so part of the latter rebuilding process involved "rebuilding" something that was already a built memorial for the dead. The impulse to recover and mourn the dead, then, is also an impulse to recover the memorials of the past, memorials that in our nostalgic vision, somehow worked to compensate for loss. One artifact that exemplifies this dynamic is a Souvenir Pin displayed prominently on the museum website's Interactive Timeline, a commemorative object created by the financial services company, Dean Witter, after the 1993 attacks. The pin, which features a cartoonish image of the Twin Towers and a slogan about how, "We lost our space but kept our pace!" testifies to the "can do" spirit of American perseverance echoed in the "After 9/11" recovery narrative. But within the museum, the pin works as a double souvenir, a memento of a memento. Discovered in the ruins after September 11, 2001, the pin embodies a counter-intuitive longing for a time of trauma, but a trauma from which we eventually healed.

Embedded in a display case within a dividing wall between the second and third rooms, the salvaged fragment from Zimmerman's memorial fountain occupies a privileged position within the museum as a hinge between the first and second half of the "BEFORE 9/11" section. It is the last artifact visitors see as they exit the room dedicated to the 1993 attacks, situated within a wall-sized version of Allan Tannenbaum's iconic photograph of the Twin Towers - an image taken after electrical power was restored to the buildings less than seven hours after the explosion. Superimposed against Tannenbaum's triumphant photo are two quotations that exemplify the museum's appeal to narrative plotting: one by Governor Mario Cuomo dated Feb 17, 1993, and one from bomber, Nidal Ayyad, discovered in a letter on his hard drive in March 1993. Echoing and foreshadowing Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's post 9/11 political rhetoric, the Cuomo statement that "what we must do in this safest and greatest city and state and nation in the world is return as quickly as we can to normalcy" lends an eerie sense of continuity and inevitability to the 2001 attacks, recapitulated in Ayyad's threat: "we promise you that next time it will be very precise and the World Trade Center will continue to be one of our targets." But despite the threat of immanent violence, the relic's placement within that museum wall exemplifies how the ruins of the past function to iterate the promise of safety and security. As one Port Authority employee's voice rings out in an audio recording, despite the unrecoverable loss of six lives, the predominant feeling after the 1993 attacks was, "Hallelujah! We're back in operation, we're back to life."9

February 26, 1993 appears in the museum and on the timeline primarily as a story of national triumph and bureaucratic efficiency: the bomb exploded at 12:18 PM, and within twelve hours all but the six who died were freed from the building. The quick recovery of the victims' bodies appears in stark contrast to the interminable process of recovering the remains of the dead after the 2001 attacks. The swiftness with which detectives "solved the crime" culminated in the trial of the four perpetrators, just over one year later. The 1993 WTC Bombing Timeline offers a story of protection, of "safety enhancements made by the Port Authority after the 1993 bombing" that come to "help thousands of people to evacuate, many in less than one hour." This sense of efficiency and safety is even more pronounced in the museum itself, where placards dedicated to the "Return to Normalcy," "Emergency Preparedness," and "Security Measures" make the "1993 Bombing" Room seem like some sort of disclaimer. According to these placards, the 1993 attacks led to changes in policy "that made it possible for thousands of people in the towers to evacuate safely before the buildings fell on September 11, 2001." Financial services executive Charles Maikish's comment, displayed prominently on a placard, that "In some sense, by attempting the events in 1993, the terrorists saved thousands of lives on 9/11" risks making the room less a space of commemorative practice and more an advertisement for idealized safety procedures that were distinctly inadequate in 2001 - a narrative that is more or less erased from the museum's history.

Simultaneously, the focus on seemingly obvious markers of impending doom (Ayyad's threat, for instance), ends up affirming the nation as a functional guardian of its citizens, constituting a belated "orange alert" in which we come to imagine we could have predicted the events of 9/11 because our sense of safety was already undermined. The museum produces not just the space but the time of knowledge, a spatialized map of causation in which we imagine we could somehow predict and contain these events. This is not to suggest that the attacks are not historically linked; it is merely to suggest that the kinds of temporal encapsulation at work in the museum demand closer attention, particularly when the urge to form a narrative link between the two attacks seems to efface other more pressing historical links. Totally obscured by this narrative, of course, is the historical "pattern" of globalization, which the museum effaces in favor of other kinds of apparent causal links, the most absurd of which is, perhaps, the clunky 1990s laptop computer belonging to Ramzi Yousef, one of the 1993 perpetrators, with a simple explanation: "Their use of a laptop in a remote location, far from the target, foreshadowed the 9/11 plot." This appeal to a seemingly obvious narrative device reduces a complex and multiple dynamic of causation into a teleology that gets reified repeatedly within the 1993 exhibit. The most poignant example, perhaps, is the text accompanying the central artifact from the "The 1993 Bombing" - a wall fragment from the B-2 level of the World Trade Center Parking garage.  Engraved across the protective glass covering is a quotation attributed to Time Magazine from March 8, 1993: "Last week, in an instant, the World Trade Center in New York City became ground zero." The phrase "ground zero" functions as a kind of familiar repetition within the museum, something that seems to suggest to viewers that while we might think of 2001 as our originary trauma, there is nevertheless something before it, marking it as part of a seemingly predetermined pattern: it was already Ground Zero. The museum consoles its visitors by crafting this simple causal narrative out of a temporally discordant set of events. By putting its odd, compressed version of "before" after "9/11," the museum invokes a paradoxically linear logic. It invites visitors to make their way through the convoluted 2001 "timeline" and to emerge, suddenly, into a clearly illuminated space in which the elements of a familiar plot are laid bare - a space that somehow seems to answer that question, "Why did this happen?" The ostensible non-linearity of the Historical Exhibition's structure magically becomes linear, spelling out a narrative in which the shock of unimaginable violence is a fathomable telos. Its artifacts testify to a fundamental tension between the museum's conflicting implication that the time "Before 9/11" was a picture-perfect era for which we should still yearn and, at the same time, the clear-cut beginning of its inevitable end.

Sarah Senk is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hartford, where she specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglophone literature, trauma theory, and cultural memory. She teaches courses on postcolonial fiction and poetry, literature of the African diaspora (particularly the Caribbean), the contemporary novel, memory studies, and visual culture after 9/11.