Vol 9, Issue 1, Spring 2007

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Order from Chaos: The Sensemaking Structure and Therapeutic Function of Mediated Eyewitness Accounts of the September 11th Attacks

Kathleen C. Haspel
Fairleigh Dickinson University

Abstract

This paper is based on a study of personal experience narratives told by witnesses of the September 11th attacks in calls to C-SPAN. Drawing on research on narratives of ordinary and extraordinary experiences and witnessing, the author offers a framework for analyzing the structure and function of eyewitness accounts. Analysis focuses on methods callers use to show and tell the audience where they were, what they were doing, and what they were thinking at the time of the attacks. Verbal, visual, and structural features of these narratives are highlighted, with particular attention given to orientation and ideation components of the narratives. The design of these components and their location within the callers’ stories are shown to construct the narratives as eyewitness accounts, position the callers and audience members as witnesses, and engage all in a therapeutic sensemaking process.

Ask people what they remember about extraordinary tragic events occurring in their lifetime—the Virginia Tech shootings, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, the September 11th attacks, the Columbine High School shootings, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the removal of family members to internment or concentration camps—and you are likely to hear them tell where they were and what they were doing at the time that 'it' happened (or they were told about 'it')—the event that would indelibly mark their lives in terms of before and after. Those who live with the impact of these great public tragedies are so driven to communicate about them that many do so immediately, while still caught in the chaotic web wrought by great disruptions to ordinary life as they knew it. Some turn to personal diaries (Filopovic & Challenger, 2006) or web logs ("blogs"), to record their experience (see Burden, 2006; Riverbend, 2006). Others, like the reporters in Dealey Plaza and lower Manhattan, capture narrative fragments with whatever media are available: scraps of paper, hand-held cameras, or cell phones. Still others find public mediated forums, such as internet bulletin boards and call-in talk shows, within which to share their extraordinary personal experiences, as did hundreds of New Yorkers in the moments and days following September 11th. As will be argued in this paper, their detailed narration of these disruptions of life as they knew it provides them with a means of unraveling their chaotic experiences strand by strand, weaving them into stories made meaningful for others, and in the course of doing so, making sense of them.

What is striking about these narratives is their immediacy to the events the capture, their coherence, and their accessibility. They are at once disturbing and eloquent, factual yet emotional and evaluative, like 911 calls of another kind in which extraordinary personal experiences are reported to strangers.1 The complex design and multiple functions of personal narratives produced for a public audience or record render them sufficiently intriguing to be worthy of study regardless of their subject. But when these narratives are eyewitness accounts of crises in progress, their coherence and eloquence are even more impressive, considering how disorienting it must be to tell of unnatural occurrences in naturally-occurring talk-in-interaction.2 While these narratives may appear to be anything but naturally-occurring and interactive, their accessibility and inclusivity is made manifest in their recipient design,3 which is built through an array of devices, such as the use of personal pronouns (O'Connor, 1994), reported speech and thought (Holt, 1996), and formulations of place (Schegloff, 1972). In this paper, I demonstrate how these devices operate within the overall structure of eyewitness accounts of the September 11th attacks told in calls to talk shows. Two calls to the Cable Service Public Access Network ("C-SPAN")4 serve as case studies of how eyewitnesses make use of common structures and ordinary descriptions to communicate their extraordinary personal experiences in a public mediated forum. In the sections that follow, I first provide a brief report on how oral narratives of personal experience have been studied, explain 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' distinctions made in this literature, and identify key models for analyzing the structure and function of these narratives. Next, I identify structural features and narrative components of two cases and explain how they are used by the callers to construct orderly and inclusive eyewitness accounts. Finally, I discuss how eyewitnesses' methods of telling about their personal experiences with public crises in a mediated forum may help them and their recipients make sense of their impact on our lives, so that we might recover and learn from what we have suffered.

Narrative Constructions of Ordinary and Extraordinary Experiences

The Extraordinary in the Study of Ordinary Narrative

Ray B. Browne and Arthur B. Neal (2001) define extraordinary events as those that are so disruptive of the routines and assumptions that constitute ‘normal’ life that they invoke strong reactions from people. Although most of us experience such events vicariously through stories told via mass media, it is through the “more immediate patterns of social interaction,” say Browne and Neal, that we “fine-tune” our comprehension of them so that they become “a part of our understanding of the organization of social life in general” (2001, p. 8).

Social scientists in general and narrative scholars in particular have been drawn to studying how people recount extraordinary or ‘critical incidents’ in their lives because tellers are presumed to become so involved in telling what happened that they “relive” the experience with minimal self-monitoring (Labov, 1972; Nelson & Horowitz, 2001). Research on the structure and function of oral narratives of personal experience, whose origins are usually traced to the work of William Labov (1972; 2004) and his colleagues, has been largely generated from subjects’ responses to “danger-of-death” questions5 inviting them to tell of unusual, terrifying, experiences (Labov, 1972; O’Connor, 1994; Harris, 2001). Labov proposed that these experiences were worth reporting more so than those that are “run-of-the mill” because they allow us to observe how tellers transform their experience into “reportable” narratives, by virtue of an overall organizing principle he calls the “narrative syntax” (1972, p. 371). Livia Polanyi (1985) expanded on Labov’s work, using stories about dangerous situations told in interview and conversational contexts.6 She devised a method of mapping out and distinguishing between the “clauses” of these narratives that were oriented to the world in which the story was told and those that were oriented to the world invoked by the story, in order to better understand how storytelling provides entrée into a teller’s worldview. Polanyi’s interest in stories “built around deviations from expected norms of behavior” is primarily cultural; she claims that they allow us to observe what it is important to members of a culture through their constructions of “the way the world should not be” (pp. 81-82).

The Ordinary in the Extraordinary Narrative

In more recent work, Labov (2004) highlights the significance of seemingly insignificant details in oral narratives of personal experience. He notes that telling about daily routines in the story of losing a loved one, for example, may serve to mitigate the teller’s responsibility for the death and heighten the listener’s sense of the impact it had on the teller. The inclusion of mundane details in stories provides “background information” against which the “climax” of a story can be contrasted and more fully appreciated, says Charles Goodwin (1984). Harvey Sacks, whose Lectures on Conversation (Jefferson, 1992) focus on storytelling because of the access it provides to the ways in which members construct their social worlds and activities, was also drawn to talk of unusual occurrences, but he was most intrigued with how tellers recounted such events in most ordinary ways (Sacks, 1984). He collected stories from media as well as conversation in which people described their initial reactions to events that were outside the realm of their ordinary experience (such as a hijacking or robbery) as a joke, a movie, or some other familiar activity. Building on his collection of these “contrast class” descriptions, Sacks’ student Gail Jefferson (1995), has suggested that they serve a normalizing function.

What this research tells us about how people communicate their experience with extraordinary events is that they package and deliver it in somewhat standardized and normalized ways, despite the uniquely horrific circumstances that give rise to them. Given that media news reports of extraordinary events are simplified and personalized into narrative themes so as to make them understandable to ordinary citizens (Browne & Neal, 2001), it stands to reason that ordinary citizens’ stories of extraordinary experiences told via mass media would be too. Yet on closer examination, they are not so simple. The uniquely horrific circumstances of the lay eyewitness reporter’s experience are not necessarily stripped away as they might be from a professional journalist’s official news report, and for good reason. Ordinary persons have no official credentials to show in order to entitle them to tell their stories in public, but they can offer “that they saw [the event], and that they suffered by it” present themselves as legitimate witnesses.7 As the cases examined below demonstrate, lay eyewitness reporters show themselves to be doing what any ordinary person would do or think when ‘it’ happened, sometimes in incredibly mundane detail, in order to lend their accounts credibility and impact. But in order to engage audience members to take their perspective on a world gone awry so that they might see that they were ‘there’ and suffer along with them, narrators of extraordinary personal experiences especially need to tell their stories in an orderly fashion. Next we turn to some models gleaned from research on the structural organization of personal narratives to see what that order might look like.

Models of Personal Experience Narratives

Despite the wide variety of horrors witnessed by humankind over the last century that have been captured in first person accounts made public in print, radio, and visual media, research on the structure and function of personal narratives offers three basic formats for describing how they are told: the narrative syntax of the story told in response to interview questions or request, the course-of-action format of the story told in conversation, and the contrastive design of reports of extraordinary experiences.

Narrative syntax. Labov’s model for analyzing personal experience narratives originally consisted of six components (Abstract, Orientation, Complicating Action, Evaluation, Resolution, and Coda) organized in an implicitly chronological format; that is, the order of the narrative’s clauses was to match the order in events presumably occurred (Labov, 1972, pp. 359-360; see Labov’s narrative syntax). This model has been widely applied to studies of personal narrative (see Langellier, 1989), with some modifications. Applications have shown that components are sometimes combined, omitted, repeated, or exist in some other order than that initially proposed by Labov, suggesting that a more flexible model is needed to describe narrative communication in some contexts. Harris (2001), for example, reports that the testimony of legal witnesses commonly begins with Orientation (“circumstances which surround the narrative account”) then moves into what she calls the Core Narrative (“the account itself”), and that Evaluation may appear anywhere in their narratives, or more often, in the questions of attorneys (p. 60). Other scholars have noted the model’s limited application to narratives about life experiences that are ongoing, chaotic, or indeterminate, such as living with a health crisis (Frank, 1995). Yet Labov has maintained that the “minimal narrative” need only consist of Orientation and Complicating Action in a sequence of clauses that are “temporally ordered” (Labov, 1972, p. 360; see also Labov, 2004).

Course-of-action storytelling. Sacks also proposed a minimal two-part model for storytelling, but with a consequential organization, exemplified by a story told by a child: “the baby cried; the mommy picked it up”.8 Sacks noted that differences in the ways in which narratives are structured stem from the contexts in which they are created.9 For example, structural distinctions can be seen between those narratives that are produced through question-answer sequences, as in legal interrogation and news interviews, and those produced in public forums.10 Sacks referred to these different narrative structures as the “request” and the “course-of-action” formats, and described them as being concerned with information and circumstances, respectively (emphasis added). Each poses some constraints or demands on participants in the storytelling. The request format puts “restraints on how the story is to be reported so as to be recognizable … as a news report,” which may constrain a teller from reporting the “kind of experience it was” for her (Sacks in Jefferson, 1992, p. 231). The course-of-action format, on the other hand, puts demands on the listener, who, as recipient of “a series of teller actions … fitted into … [a] report of the teller’s circumstances,” must make sense of each new feature in relation to what’s already been told (p. 231). The course-of-action format may therefore be seen to facilitate interaction between tellers and recipients by engaging recipients in an inference-making process.

Contrastive formulations of extraordinary experiences. A third area of narrative research suggests that what people tell about also has some bearing on the structure and function of their stories. Studies of news stories of extraordinary events (Jefferson, 1995) and reports of paranormal experiences (Wooffitt, 1991) have revealed a particularly interesting and relevant variation on the course-of-action format, which by virtue of its X/Y design, may be called a contrastive format.

Jefferson (1995) has found that the reactions of ordinary citizens to extraordinary events quoted in the news have a distinct “at first I thought X, then I realized Y” format that allows witnesses to report ideations that are plausible but turn out to be wrong in light of the ensuing reality. 11 Robin Wooffitt (1991) has found that those who claim to witness events not normally seen by others (extraterrestrial and supernatural sightings) take pains to situate their reports in circumstances that competent members of their culture are likely to deem ‘normal’ by organizing them in an “I was doing X, when Y happened” format. Their findings suggest that even when witnesses are reporting life-threatening or terrifying experiences, they are mindful of audience evaluation and response.

All of these studies point to a consistent use of the ordinary in extraordinary personal experience narratives in a temporal, consequential order that lends the narratives impact and coherence, the narrators agency and credibility, and the audience access to the narrators’ experience of the events. But in order to understand how these structures function in personal narratives of extraordinary events, we need to see where they reside and how they work in actual stories told by witnesses of one such event, September 11th.

Examining the Ordinary in Extraordinary Eyewitness Accounts

Analysis of September 11th eyewitness calls to C-SPAN shows that while the components of their narratives varied somewhat in order and number, they consistently included Orientation, Observation, Ideation, Action, Evaluation, Resolution, and Realization, often arranged in contrastive formats (see Course-of-Action Framework for EWAs). The ordinary can be found in these narratives in detailed descriptions of mundane or routine activities and formulations of place (Orientation features) and in reported thoughts and contrastive formulations of what happened (Ideation features).

While all thirty-five calls in the data set begin with some orientation to location and situation and contain ideations of some kind, two calls in particular have been selected for analysis here (Call 1 on September 12th and Call 29 on September 13th to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal12) because of the efforts made by participants in them to show and tell where the callers were, what they were doing, and what they were thinking when they experienced the terrible events of that day.13 A brief examination of observation and ideation components of their stories follows, along with an analysis of their accounting and sensemaking, after which I discuss the power of narrative in terms of witnessing, civic participation, and therapeutic function.

Orientation in the Course-of-Action Eyewitness Account

The first call on the morning after the attacks opened with a standard introduction and greeting from the host and a simple invitation to the caller to tell the audience what he called to say. After an expression of amazement at being ‘on the air,’ 14 the caller began to recount his experience by first telling where he was (click Call 1.9.12.01 (mp3) to listen; see Call 1.9.12.01.Ex.1 for text15). He initially reports his location as a street reference with no explanation, “down on Rector Street,” as if designing his story for a recipient with local knowledge, but the host prompts him to explain “where that is,” a request that the caller takes to be an inquiry about his proximity to the World Trade Center (hereafter, “WTC”). The host’s partial repeat of the caller’s response, “Two blocks south of the World Tra-” ratifies the relevance of this information. The host goes on to ask what the caller was doing, indicating that circumstantial information is relevant too. The caller does not appear to think so as he brackets off his orientation with “b’anway” and moves on to preface his story with a description of the kind of experience September 11th was for him: “it was just amazing.” But as he proceeds to tell what he experienced that day, the caller further describes where he was and what he was doing at various points in the unfolding course of action, albeit with some difficulty. These orientations (see Call 1.orientation exs) are marked with uncertainty (with “I guess,” “maybe,” “kina,” “or something,” “or so”), downgraded (“I don’t know”), and produced with disfluency or delay, displaying some disorientation on his part. They are nevertheless included, it seems, to engage the audience to visualize what happened from his perspective as he recounts his experience step-by-step.

What is noteworthy about these instances of orientation is where and how the caller produces them within the unfolding narrative. First, they are provided within disturbing, emotionally reported scenes of action: when first encountering the carnage from the attack (Excerpt 2), when taking leave of the WTC and the officials he interacted with there (Excerpt 3), when the first tower fell (Excerpt 4), and when taking leave of the scene of the attacks altogether (Excerpt 5). All of these scenes include encounters with death, which are, to say the least, not ordinary occurrences in one’s life, and yet the caller designs them to be accessible to the ordinary recipient. He sets these scenes with mundane references to distance (in blocks and miles) and direction (east, north) and fairly neutral and accessible descriptions of what he saw (“a lot of really bad stuff” and “debris falling”).16 The abundance of detail in his orientations and their display of local knowledge alone lend his narrative authenticity as an eyewitness report (see Ellis, 2000, p. 12). But even more important, they are expressed with doubt and emotion that lend his narrative authenticity as a story of ‘what happened to me,’ offering the perfect blend of experience and information that is the discourse of the witness (see Frosh, 2006, p. 278).

What Caller 1 ultimately weaves through his integration of orientation and action description is an eyewitness account. He not only explains what happened, but the role he played in it. Accounting necessarily involves identity-negotiation as well as explanation if it going to function as a means of coping with loss (Caplan, Haslett, & Burleson, 2005, pp. 245-246). This ordinary person who happened to be in the vicinity of the WTC for a job interview (as a trainer of taxi and limousine drivers) could not have been prepared for the role he played in the extraordinary events of that day (as former paramedic-turned-rescuer). But as he reveals in the closing moments of his story, in his view, he failed to perform that role. In formulating a summary assessment of the kind of experience it was for him, he arrives at a terrible realization: that in spite of all the “amazing” things he and other New Yorkers did to help “thousands of people” that morning, “so many more thousands … didn’t make it” (see Call 1.9.12.01.Excerpt 6). This contrastive formulations shows just how his experience on September 11th violated his expectations, for good and for ill. That this witness is able to frame his experience as “amazing” (note how it echoes the preface of his story) suggests that having to provide an account of what happened allowed him to make a positive reappraisal of a terrible loss, which can be an potent coping strategy for those dealing with death (see Caplan, Haslett, & Burleson, 2005, pp. 246-247).

Orientation and Ideation in the Course-of-Action Eyewitness Account

As further evidence of the pivotal role orientation plays in the eyewitness account, we now turn to a demonstration of how it works with ideation and other narrative components in call 29 made to C-SPAN on September 13th, 2001. In this case, the caller needs no prompting to explain his location. As he moves into telling what happened, he points out his location within the World Financial Center17 (“WFC”), “[his] building” or place of employment, and notes its close proximity to the WTC, by making use of the visual resources afforded by talk on a television show (Click to CSPAN Call 29.9.13 (mp3) to listen, Call 29.9.13.01.Excerpt 1 for text). Somewhat later in the call, after telling of his experience of the attack on the first (north) tower, the caller further orients the audience visually to where he was in proximity to the WTC, this time specifying his distance and field of vision regarding each tower that was hit (see Call 29.9.13.01.Excerpt 2). Showing and telling he was there is so important to this caller that he then interrupts his narrative to coordinate his orientation with images from a computer screen being shown on C-SPAN, until he is able, with the help of on-air personnel, to pinpoint exactly where he was during the attacks: “right there .h on the tenth floor” (see Call 29.9.13.01.Excerpt 3 and visual orientation sequence, Figures 4-12). These orientations are part of a case he builds to not only show that he suffered and is thereby entitled to tell his story, but to engage audience participation in the suffering he experienced by showing and telling just how close he was to the buildings that were hit (through orientation), and how ‘what happened’ violated his expectations (through ideation) at two key moments in his narrative.

The first instance of his use of ideation accompanied by orientation comes after he specifies his location and distance vis à vis the WTC as “a hundred maybe two hundred yards away” (lines 10-11, Call 29.9.13.01.Excerpt 2). In proceeding to tell what happened, he instead tells what did not happen, “and we actually- they actually didn’t evacuate our building immediately…” (lines 12-13), before moving on to provide more orienting information, “and we were at the win:dows, (.) sort of watching the building on fi:re for a while…” (line 14, Call 29.9.13.01.Excerpt 2). Another, related instance occurs after his extended visual orientation session (lines 21-24, Call 29.9.13.01.Excerpt 3), where he reports once more on the delayed evacuation: “they didn’t finally start evacuating till about nine thirty” (line 25). While these may, prima facie, sound like action descriptions, their negative formulation of what happened (in terms of what “didn’t” happen) imagines an alternative course of action that could have been taken.18 Although they do not take an “at first X, then Y” form, these formulations pose a contrast between ideation and reality, and in so doing, offer an evaluation of what happened as unexpected and “in-principle wrong” (Jefferson, 1995, p. 13). Their temporal and spatial orientations further implicate failure of some kind, but they leave it to the audience to infer that if the caller and others were close enough to see debris from their windows, they probably should have been evacuated before nine-thirty, and may have suffered physical or psychological injury as a result.19 And while it may not seem particularly useful to discuss what ‘could’ have been done after the fact, use of modals can engender talk of alternative realities, which can initiate a therapeutic process, even in mediated discourse, says Gaik (1992), by moving audience members to speculate or contemplate, rather than just react.

This is where this caller’s eyewitness account is crafted, by marking the extraordinary as what “people” did not realize, expect, or ever think of, in contrast to what might ordinarily be expected to happen in such a situation: that people would be evacuated and saved, not that “whole buildings would collapse” and “many people [would be] … killed” (lines 32-34, Call 29.9.13.01 transcript). In all of the instances of ideation and realization in his narrative, Caller 29 attributes what was thought or realized to a collective: “people didn’t realize,” “people thought,” “never really entered anyone’s mind,” “we all knew,” “it entered no one’s mind,” and “you realize.” It appears as if the caller has taken ownership of others’ thoughts, but seen another way, it is a move to make his personal experience public and his individual perspective collective. With these simple pronominal shifts, he draws the audience into his experience even while distancing himself from it, effectively putting it into perspective, a key to “ego-integration,” otherwise known as sensemaking (see Caplan, Haslett, & Burleson, 2005, pp. 244-245). To Barbie Zelizer (2002), moving “from the personal act of ‘seeing’ to the adoption of a public stance” constitutes “bearing witness” (p. 698). Individual witnesses who adopt such a stance, says Zelizer, “become part of the collective working through trauma together” (p. 698). Thus in inviting others to take his perspective at the windows of the tenth floor of the World Financial Center and on the top of a ferry on the Hudson pulling away from it, this witness engages his audience to “imagine momentarily what it is like for remote others over ‘there’,” which casts them as witnesses too (Frosh, 2006, p. 280).

Conclusions

Witnessing, Sensemaking, and the Course-of-Action Narrative

What these examples of witnessing show us is that “[e]vents occurring in the broader society … [can be] of practical importance to us,” and that the concern of the witness is “not so much with really knowing what happened ‘out there’ as it is with establishing reference points for orienting our own lives” (Browne & Neal, 2001, p. 8). Nowhere is this concern more evident, say Browne and Neal, than in the ways that witnesses “recall the[ir] routine activities … when they were interrupted by some major event” (2001, p. 8). The “course-of-action” and contrastive narrative formats employed by these witnesses take us through the course of their making sense of September 11th: from individual, local recollections (e.g. “I was getting a cup of coffee in the pantry area of the tenth floor when people started running by and screaming”) to the ‘bigger picture,’ surveying the experience from a distant, public position (e.g. “you realize that this was gonna be a … tragedy without comparison in US history”).

While only two cases were examined here, these first hand accounts of personal experience with extraordinary events demonstrate that in making sense of a major crisis, narrative structure matters, and can matter for many, in stories produced in a relatively unconstrained public sphere that privileges the spontaneous production of citizen discourse (cf. Peters, 2001)20. The course-of-action personal narratives told by ordinary citizens in an open-access mediated public sphere like C-SPAN (cf. sound bites in network news) make witnesses of the narratives themselves. “Witnessing texts,” according to Frosh (2006), are those whose “structure interacts with the audience,” “engage[s] them in producing imagined worlds,” and ultimately “produce[s collective] experience out of discourse” (pp. 274-275). The narrative engagement of the audience is most evident in these witnesses’ use of ordinary, detailed descriptions in orienting the audience to their experience, and the strategic location of their orientations and ideations prior to action descriptions so that the audience might see and feel what it was like for them. Moreover, the narrators’ integration of ideations in contrastive formulations of what happened conveys the tension between normalcy and disruptions of such normalcy that is indigenous to the process of making sense of terrible experiences (Polanyi, 1985, p. 81).

The Power of Eyewitness Accounts of Extraordinary Events

What is the power of narrative in times of crisis? I submit that the power lies in the narrator’s use of the ordinary to orient us in times of disorientation. For Paul Frosh (2006), the shared social space of media witnessing and the mass audience design of its constructions of reality cast all who participate in it as ‘ordinary people,’ so the victims we see might be ‘anyone’ (pp. 281-282). He proposes that herein lies the power of contemporary media witnessing to foster identification and caring, by “extend[ing] and replenish[ing] our ability to imagine what it might be like to be someone else—wherever they might be” (Frosh, 2006, p. 282). But as Carrie Rentschler (2004) and others point out, images alone don’t move us to act, narratives do, because while images shock, “[n]arratives can make us understand” (p. 300). Much of the recent research and writing on witnessing21 privileges the visual over the verbal, overlooking how, in mediated public spheres, the two modes work together to tell a story and move audiences. Ellis (2000) notes that the power of an image of some extraordinary event to witness “is underwritten by the presence of the entirely unremarkable within [it], and of the atmosphere of the sound” (p. 12). Visual media provide a “superabundance of information” that can “produce a sense of disorientation,” says Ellis, without narration to direct our eyes and our understanding (2000, p. 13).

Witnessing as civic action. So what do we, as citizens, do with this privileged position of the witness that we all occupy in some regard, having shared in the suffering of others via mass media? We use our public institutions or construct public sites for bearing witness, says Zelizer (2002). And we should use our narratives as “models of witnessing that are politically powerful but not based in claims of victimization,” says Rentschler, to be “citizen-witnesses”—those who are oriented to others and doing for the greater good in the worst of circumstances (2004, p. 302). Cathy Hainer’s personal yet accessible chronicle of her life with (and death from) cancer was such a model for readers of her USA Today column (see Beck, 2005). That first eyewitness account told on C-SPAN by Caller 1 on September 12, 2001 is another. His story casts him not as a hero whose shoes are too big for the ordinary citizen to fill, but as a model witness: one who thought and acted on behalf of others, told of his experience with those who could no longer tell of theirs, and who framed the experience as awful yet amazing. Caller 29’s account provides another. It offers an ordinary person’s eye view of the attacks that no aerial camera could capture and yet speaks on behalf of those who had to survey and make sense of the attacks from a distance. Another model of citizen witnessing exists in post-September 11th New York City, in the MTA’s “if you see something, say something” security campaign,22 which encourages citizens to report their everyday noticings of something that seems out-of-the-ordinary to police, TSA, or FBI officers for the safety of all. In sum, the power of the eyewitness account in times of crisis lies its ability to turn personal experience into civic action for a public good, whether it be a matter of physical or mental well-being.

Witnessing’s therapeutic function. But can these narratives promote healing? Perhaps for New Yorkers who achieve a sense of validation, responsibility, or agency through such action (in contrast to feeling vulnerable, victimized, or guilty), ‘saying something’ is therapeutic. But can saying something about witnessing the extraordinary experience alone be therapeutic? It depends on the telling and how it is told. While experts on coping with trauma and loss generally promote “verbalization” of “major life distressing experiences” because it can foster “adaptive cognitive change” (Caplan, Haslett, & Burnett, 2005, pp. 237, 244), they differ on the effects of doing so in narrative form. Some propose that

'translating the chaotic swirl of traumatic ideation and feelings into coherent language' ... may foster adaptive reappraisals because it helps one to clarify ... [them] and better comprehend the experience (Caplan, Haslett, & Burleson, 2005, p. 237, citing Harber & Pennebaker, 1992, p. 360).

Others (Nelson & Horowitz, 2001) suggest that by telling a story about a sad experience one is likely to “relive” it, evoking emotions that might otherwise be guarded against if one were to describe the experience in abstract terms.23 “By narrating” in the course of interaction, on the other hand, “a speaker can use a listener to help examine the details of the speaker’s own experience” (Nelson & Horowitz, 2001, p. 318). Merely having to communicate one’s experience to others in the coherent form of a narrative requires one to occupy a “different vantage point,” say Kristin L. Nelson and Leonard M. Horowitz, if not take an “evaluative stance, which can be an index of therapeutic change” (2001, p. 318). On this view, the structure of the narrative can be seen to display a cognitive process, not merely mirror a sequence of events. Caplan, Haslett, and Burleson’s (2005) research shows that organizing an experience of loss into a narrative that moves from “factual description to evaluation and expression of emotions” can facilitate a transition from “focus[ing] on the loss” to “integrat[ing] it into an overall life perspective” (p. 244). What we might see in the course-of-action structure of the eyewitness accounts analyzed here, then, is the manifestation of not only a gradual sensemaking process, but of stages of a grieving process.

This research suggests that organizing one’s experience of a sad and traumatic event like September 11th or the more recent Virginia Tech shootings into a narrative that moves from descriptions of ordinary activities and ideations, to the emotional expression of realizations, and finally to the occupation of an evaluative stance, may in effect achieve the “transformation of experience” through narrative imagined by Labov (1972). Like the testimony of the victim-turned-witness who is asked in a court of law to tell what happened to her from start to finish sparing no detail, the victim-witnesses who tell their stories in the court of public opinion, the mediated public sphere, might achieve some remedial action—but of a restorative, rather than a punitive, kind. For witnesses for whom public tragedy entered their personal experience, restoration appears to begin with a return to the place where it first entered, a reorientation into their ordinary world turned ‘the way it should not be,’ and a realization of their retreat from it, achieved through a course-of-action eyewitness account. But as Arthur Frank (1995) reminds us, not everyone is able to tell such a coherent story; some tell “chaos narratives.” The findings of this study suggest that even the ostensibly disorderly narrative told in the course of conversation or in media res can tell us something about how to make sense of a major stressful life experience, by showing us how one manages to think and act as an ordinary person living through extraordinary, traumatic times.

Ackowledgement

This paper is based on a study of calls made by ordinary citizens to C-SPAN, the Cable Service Public Access Network, from September 11th-18th, 2001, made possible by a C-SPAN in the Classroom grant. A selection from this data set was presented at the International Communication Association’s Preconference on Mediated Communication in May 2007. The analytical framework offered in this paper is derived from a study of on-line eyewitness accounts of the September 11th attack on New York presented at the 2003 International Communication Association Conference.

I dedicate this paper to all who personally suffer from public tragedy, especially the students, faculty, and staff of Virginia Tech and the residents of New York and Washington and surrounding areas. I thank guest editor Trudy Hanson and two anonymous reviewers for their advice and comments, and gratefully acknowledge the inspiration and assistance provided by Michael G. Lacy and Marguerite Maria Rivas.

Footnotes

  1. Note how teacher Patty Nielson manages to identify herself, describe the situation, and explain what has happened and is happening in her call from the library of Columbine High School (audio recording and transcript available at http://www.acolumbinesite.com/911/index.html).
  2. This is the term commonly used by language and social interaction scholars to refer to spontaneous, unscripted talk or conversation.
  3. "Recipient design" is Harvey Sacks'(1970a/1992) term for the ways a storyteller shows or tells recipients a storytelling that the story is being told with an "orientation" to them (pp. 230-231).
  4. These calls were selected from a set of 35 calls made to C-SPAN by eyewitnesses to the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. over a two day period, from September 12th-13th, 2001. One of the calls analyzed in this paper was the first call from an eyewitness on September 12th. The other is the 29th call made on September 13th to a line that was established for eyewitnesses.
  5. Labov and his colleagues Paul Cohen, John Lewis, and Clarence Robins, in their study of the "black English vernacular" asked urban adolescents "Were you ever in a situation where you were in serious danger of being killed, where you said to yourself—'this is it'?" (Labov, 1972, p. 354).
  6. One story collected by Labov et al. and analyzed by Polanyi ("The Baddest Girl in the Neighborhood") was told in response to a variation on the 'danger-of-death' question, "Were you ever in a fight with a guy bigger than you?" (Labov, 1972, p. 354). Another ("Fainting on the Subway") was told in response to the question "Have you ever had any interesting experiences on the subway?," asked by Deborah Tannen in her study of New York Jewish conversational style (see Polanyi, 1985, pp. 63-64).
  7. See Sacks' 1970 lecture, "Storyteller as ‘witness:’ Entitlement to experience" in Jefferson (1992), volume II, p. 243.
  8. See Sacks' Spring 1966 lectures in Jefferson (1992).
  9. See Sacks' 1970 lecture, "Story organization; Tellability; Coincidence, etc." in Jefferson (1992), volume II, pp. 229-241.
  10. Note, for example how 9-11 eyewitness reports told in interviews generally begin with reactions to or evaluations of the event (see http://www.towerstories.org/stories.php), while those told in public forums begin with detailed, descriptive orientations to where the witnesses were and what they were doing when it happened (see http://wasearch.loc.gov/sep11/20011130135323/http://mystory.inter.net/index.php).
  11. Personal narratives of September 11th make regular use of this thought/realized contrast, particularly those told by people who first heard of the attacks from another source (media or another person). Among the "at firsts" commonly cited by New Yorkers that day as well as by subjects of Jefferson' study is that they thought that 'it' was an accident, a joke, or that a movie was being made, before seeing with their own eyes that this was not the case.
  12. Washington Journal is a daily news talk program that airs on C-SPAN weekdays from 6-9 a.m. Eastern Time. The program typically consists of interview segments followed by call-in segments on topic. Occasionally there are "open phones" segments, when callers may call to talk about any topic. On September 11th, C-SPAN kept their phone lines open around the clock. On September 12th, the program day opened with an open phones segment. Due to audience response to the first call (which was replayed three hours later), a line was reserved for "Eyewitnesses" through September 13th. For more on Washington Journal, go to http://www.c-span.org/homepage.asp?Cat=Series&Code=WJE&ShowVidNum=9&Rot_Cat_CD=WJ&Rot_HT=206&Rot_WD=
    &ShowVidDays=100&ShowVidDesc=&ArchiveDays=30
  13. These calls were among 26 (74% of the 35 calls transcribed) that began with reports of where the callers were (in proximity to the World Trade Center) and what they were doing when they experienced the attacks first-hand.
  14. The surprise expressed by these callers upon entering the airwaves is an indication of the minimal screening and delay with which calls are handled on C-SPAN. I am grateful to Bob Craig for this observation and Steve Scully for providing information about C-SPAN's practices that confirms it.

    Another possible reason for Caller 1's surprise at "get[ting] through" is that phone service was interrupted or unavailable to many callers in the New York City area on September 11th and ensuing days.
  15. For ease of reference, segments of the calls will be displayed as consecutively numbered excerpts. It is recommended that readers refer to the complete transcript of each call for an indication of where each excerpt falls in the course of each telling: Call 1.9.12.01 transcript; Call 29.9.13.01 transcript.
  16. Like his orientations to where he was, these descriptions appear to be a feature of audience design, but might also be heard as evidence of censorship before a live audience. He sums up what he sees on Greenwich Street en route to the WTC, initially described as "body parts," as "a lot of really bad stuff." He chokes up twice when trying to explain what he had to look for and steer evacuees from at the WTC: "debris." In a number of New Yorkers' eyewitness accounts, "debris" is used as a gloss to refer to what was "falling" from the towers, which included people who jumped. I am grateful to Marguerite Rivas for this observation. (See also Florence Engoran's story in DiMarco, 2004).
  17. Three World Financial Center, which sustained major damage in the attacks.
  18. Labov calls comparable components of narratives marked by modals such as 'could' "irrealis clauses," which he says present "an alternate stream of reality: potential events or outcomes that were not in fact realized" that cast an evaluation on what did happen (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/Papers/OE.pdf).
  19. The audience would or could have known that nine-thirty is approximately half an hour from when the second plane hit the south tower (26 minutes earlier) and from when it fell (35 minutes later).
  20. Peters (2001) fears that in settings where "speech and truth are policed in multiple ways," as in courtrooms and mediated public forums driven by institutional interests, "testimonies can be shaped by the schematic constraints of narrative structure" (p. 710).
  21. See Frosh (2006), Rentschler (2004), and Ellis (2000) for reviews of this literature.
  22. For more on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority ("MTA") of New York's security campaign, go to http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/mta/security/index.html.
  23. Perhaps this further explains Caller 1's glosses and generalized descriptions (see note 16).

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About the Author

Kathleen Haspel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Communication & Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication from Rutgers University and is a native New Yorker. Her research centers on personal narrative and other discursive practices in public, mediated, and institutional contexts, including calls to talk shows, 911 calls, and transplant donation calls.