Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the news media have been asking: will life ever get back to normal ('normal' referring to the comfortable and distanced life of the American self before the attack)? It appears that contrarily, Americans returned to a international normalcy the moment the attack occurred. The normalcy of the human condition, in a global sense, involves continual balance between working, eating, sleeping, playing and fucking on the one hand, and instability, fear, confusion and uneasiness on the other. In other words, most people in the world consciously exist in the delicate and complicated scene of geopolitics, while at the same time spend most of their waking hours living as if the world is much more stable than it is. Like myself, many Americans think that everything in their lives has been displaced by the attacks and consequently we should wait for the next installment of this situation to be presented through the news. Regular life need not go on. But regular life is directly connected to the world events, affecting us perceptibly for the first time in many of our lives, and will continue to do so perpetually, which is hard for many of us to understand. Life must go on. And in this life, art will be created, but this art will be the product of a new American self.

After September 11, will writing resume the life it lived before September 11? Can the young writers (when speaking of 'young writers' I am referring to the young writers who publish stories, essays, poems, and images on websites like this one, myself included) that fill up the pages of on-line literary journals find that safe distance; that tone of invulnerability that enabled their clever tone and style to flourish so pervasively before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Suddenly, being clever does not seem as appealing or appropriate as it once had. Depth of meaning has possibly gained creditability to a people struggling to understand their position and place in an ambiguous and complex existence, yet possibly, much harder to articulate.

Postmodernism, in an American sense, seems a product of safety and comfort--understood and conceived from a position of power--from the seat of a growing global hegemony. With little to lose, writers became aware of their forms and styles and allowed them to become the bulk of their content (possibly because there was nothing else to write about). These authors primarily wrote, figuratively at least, about writing. Soon, fiction will appear in on-line journals which was written in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. It will take some time for it to appear--it needs to be written, workshopped, re-written, re-workshopped, and eventually published. But this writing will reflect a new era of what Fredric Jameson calls, "political unconscious." American writers have been pulled back to a concrete earth, pulled in from a fantasy world of everythingness--a world where nothing needed to be real, so anything was. Self-discovery--in a more literal sense--will be required by these writers; they will explore the world to find their position, only to find it dramatically different from their previous, rarely discussed presumed stance in the geopolitical reality. Repositioned, young American writers' styles, content, and forms will be drastically affected and altered. In the unconscious of their texts, they will have to reaffirm various challenged hegemonic beliefs, previously assumed constant and permanent, while also resolving prominent incongruities thriving between their earlier notions of the relationship of the world to their existence and a world encroaching in on them.

Validity should become less a concern, but may develop into a significant problem for these writers. For in reaction to their insecurities, they might adopt a tone of validity. Before the attacks, the young Americans seemed predominantly secure of the validity of their work, eyeing instead the questionable presence of meaning. Postmodernism can teach us that validity is inevitably a problematic issue, while meaningfulness need not be. Can any text be ultimately valid in its position? Many Americans are trying to determine this politically, while others are attempting to prove their position is through a show of nationalism, surface banter, and substandard rhetoric. "Cowards", "wanted dead or alive," and flag decals do not achieve legitimacy. The further one explores the complexity of the geopolitical situation, the more one would probably move beyond striving for righteousness and towards meaningfulness and depth.

What is meaningful now? How will writers reflect the intricacy of the American unconscious at this moment? Through meaningful and deep explorations of human experiences, writers may produce such works. These works need not deal with the attack directly, for every text produced after the attack will be affected indirectly and consumed by readers who live in the aftermath. Maybe now that the collective unconscious has been greatly traumatized, the changes in texts will provide a contrast--a foil--to help in defining and understanding the pre-September 11th American postmodern writers and how they been affected in meaningful and profound ways by the attack.