“Paradoxes and Substitutions: Charting Patterns in the American Novels of 9/11”
Kate Mason
PhD Thesis
2010
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Abstract
This thesis argues that the novels of 9/11 form a distinct genre within contemporary American fiction that poses a challenge to the dominant tenets of postmodernism. Ranging across diverse forms, narratives, registers and readership, the thesis claims the fiction of 9/11 is defined by a shared mediation of the cultural and aesthetic representational dilemmas associated with loss in the aftermath.
This thesis identifies the recurrent patterns and shared figurations by which these novels portray and re-imagine the event and memory of 9/11 to argue that its representation is always paradoxical. Specifically, the thesis interrogates various literary techniques that oscillate between the three main paradoxes of absence and presence, speech and silence and specificity and universality in its mediation of 9/11.
Central to this literature, and hence its analysis, is the problematic and trauma of loss. The thesis turns to this vital concern with the lens of psychoanalysis. It will consider the ways that many of the fictional strategies for dealing with loss that recur across the novels centre upon the tropes of substitution, repetition and compulsion, and the ways these types of operations play out across the areas of the body, the city and time.
These related sites of trauma organise the thesis and the first chapter argues that the novels attempt to offer substitutes for the lost body of 9/11 because a surrogate body is needed before even the simplest articulation is possible. Having established that the body authorises speech, the focus of the second and third chapters will be the co-ordinates of orientation: space and time, respectively. The second chapter proposes that a range of post-9/11 fictional cities have affected the ways in which urban spaces are conceptualised in the novels, both in terms of structure and figuration. The third chapter moves into an analysis of the way the event of 9/11 prompts complicated temporal manipulations and disjunctions within the novels, which speak to a wish to reverse the manifold absences of 9/11. In its consideration of ten literary texts, this thesis argues that the novels of 9/11 demonstrate the imperatives to relive, revisit and reconceptualise the event, and seek to reconstitute the myriad losses sustained. 5
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 6
Preface 7
Introduction 8
Chapter One - Substitute Bodies: Corporeality in the Novels of 9/11 50
Chapter Two - Urban Space, Narrative and 9/11 102
Chapter Three - “Time is Out of Joint”: Temporality in the Novels of 9/11 153
Conclusion 189
Appendix I 196
Appendix II 203
Appendix III 205
Appendix IV 207
List of Works Cited 208
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Acknowledgements
I owe a great deal to a number of people, both professionally and personally, who have helped me immeasurably during my candidature.
Elizabeth McMahon, my supervisor, provided me with exceptional insights and provoked debate from first draft to last. Liz, you have my warmest thanks for your perspicacity, diligence and wonderful sense of humour: I’m deeply grateful.
My co-supervisor, Brigitta Olubas, grounded me in critical theory and psychoanalysis, and offered helpful feedback and encouragement.
My thanks also go to the UNSW School of English, and in particular to Sue Kossew, Anne Brewster and Paul Dawson, for excellent support, community and administrative organisation.
Heartfelt thanks to David Hume, Natasha Simonsen and Jenny Kaldor for reading sections of the thesis: your time, patience, and wisdom are deeply appreciated. Thanks also to Katherine Fallah, Alexandra Grey, Victoria Haschka, Amy Knibbs, Julia Mansour, Justine Rogers, Fiona Roughley, Christina Trahanas, Alice Tynan, James Tynan and Gillian White. Emma Mason helped to construct the cover image.
Any errors contained within are my own.
For James. 7
Preface
Sections of this thesis have been published and presented at conferences in different iterations.
“Writing from the Void: Absence and Loss in Post-9/11 Narratives”, Representations of 9/11 Conference, University of Westminster, London, March 2007.
“Reflections, Echoes and Mirrors: The Double in post-September 11 American Fiction”, University of New South Wales Postgraduate Symposium, October 2005.
“Writer’s Block: Absence in Post-9/11 American Narratives”, University of New South Wales Postgraduate Symposium, October 2006.
"The Corporeal Limits of Representation within Narrative: Bodies in American Literature of 9/11." Critical Engagements: A Journal of Criticism and Theory II.1 (2008): 137-166.
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Introduction
“Will the horrid alteration of America’s greatest city also alter the American novel?”. - James Wood, "Tell Me How Does It Feel?" The Guardian, 6 October 2001, 1.
The event of 9/111 inaugurated a new crisis of theory2 and confronted the already-waning limits of postmodernism,3 ushering in a particular range of cultural and aesthetic representational dilemmas. In the shadow of 9/11, there was a clear imperative for novelists to overcome, or at least to write against, distinctly postmodern literary constructs, such as the deep distrust of the verbal utterance, the impossibility of truth and the construction of the virtual body. Indeed, for canonical postmodern authors such as Don DeLillo, who has been “writing 9/11 novels for thirty years” (Kauffman, 652) and William Gibson, who suggests, “September 11 was the true beginning of the 21st century” (Bennie, 28), the event represented a crucial catalyst for their novels. As literature
1 I use the term ‘the event of 9/11’ with the knowledge that it contained three, separate attacks: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the thwarted attack in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, which are often conflated and symbolised solely by the figures of the Twin Towers. Media theorist Roger Simon offers an analysis of “what is meant by the notion of ‘an event’”; Simon, “Altering the “Inner Life of the Culture”: Monstrous Memory and the Persistence of 9/11.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30.3 (2008): 353-354. 2 A range of well-known critical and political theorists proclaimed the end of theory after 9/11. For example Teresa de Lauretis suggests that there is an “enigma of the now... because our theories, discourses, and knowledge are incompatible with its forms and means of expression”; de Lauretis, “Statement Due.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 367. See also Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248 and Bill Brown, “All Thumbs.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 452-457. 3 I draw on Ihab Hassan’s explications on postmodernism. See specifically Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism.” A Postmodern Reader. Eds. Joseph P. Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, (New York: SUNY Press, 1993), 273-286. Critic Edward Rothstein interprets 9/11 as a “cataclysm” that “seems to cry out for a transcendent ethical perspective”; Rothstein, “Attacks on U.S. Challenge the Perspectives of Postmodern True Believers.” New York Times 22 September 2001, sec. A: 17, para 1 and Roger Rosenblatt decrees that 9/11 brought about the end of irony; Rosenblatt, “The Age of Irony Comes to an End.” Time 16 September 2001. 9 theorist David Simpson notes of 9/11, it “has been and will be made to mark a new epoch, and as such it is already generating a mythology and a set of practices of its own” (9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, 16). With the inauguration of this new epoch, the event of 9/11 compelled writers such as DeLillo and Gibson to create a new “mythology”, in Simpson’s terms, and to imagine new modes through which they could offer compelling narratives for an event that possessed some of the most powerful and fantastical images of disaster in the modern era.4 This thesis will identify and map the ways in which the American novels of 9/11 grapple with these dilemmas, and as a consequence come to challenge postmodern literary construction at the level of narrative, figuration and language itself.
By drawing together the domains of literature and psychoanalysis, I interrogate the challenges that the event of 9/11 poses to literature, and in particular, to postmodern modes of writing, in the aftermath. The prodigious number of critical accounts of the event of 9/11 across a broad range of highly diverse discourses – international relations,5 post-colonialism,6 religion,7 film studies8 and architecture,9 to name a few – and diverse genres of fiction, such as
4 Literature theorist Miles Orvell notes that “the [World] Trade Center [collapse] became... the most photographed and most viewed event in history”; Orvell, “After 9/11: Photography, the Destructive Sublime, and the Postmodern Archive.” Michigan Quarterly Review 45.2 (2006): 244. 5 See Fareed Zakaria, “The Return of History: What September 11 Hath Wrought.” How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War, Eds. James F Hoge Jr. and Gideon Rose, (New York: Public Affairs, 2001); Noam Chomsky, 9/11, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Nicholas Guyatt, Another American Century? The United States and the World since 9/11, (London, New York: Zed Books Ltd, 2003); David Farber, ed. What They Think of Us: International Perceptions of the United States since 9/11, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and John Brenkman, The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought Since September 11, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 6 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Speech after 9-11.” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 31.2 (2004): 81-111 and Goldie Osuri, and Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee. “White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being in Australia.” Social Semiotics 14.2 (2004): 151-170. 7 See Michael J. Baxter, “Dispelling The "We" Fallacy from the Body of Christ: The Task of Catholics in a Time of War.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002): 361-373 and Yasmin Ibrahim, “9/11 as a New Temporal Phase for Islam.” Contemporary Islam 1.1 (2007): 37-51. 8 Lynn Spigel, “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11.” American Quarterly 56.2 (2004): 235-270; B. Ruby Rich, “After the Fall: Cinema Studies Post 9/11.” Cinema Journal 43.2 (2004): 109-115 and Jacqueline Brady, “Cultivating Critical Eyes: Teaching 9/11 through Video and Cinema.” Cinema Journal 43.2 (2004): 96-99. 9 Eric Lipton, and James Glanz, City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center, (New York: Times Books, 2003) and Robert Nelson, and Margaret Olin, “The Rhetoric of Monument Making: The World Trade Center.” Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade. Eds. Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 305-323. 10 crime10 and satire,11 speaks to the ways in which the event of 9/11 compelled a plethora of responses and urged writers to offer new narratives in the aftermath. In light of such a vast and diverse response, I examine a wide range of American novels that construct elaborate, fictionalised versions of the event of 9/11. In so doing, I map the network of their interconnection and as it articulates with other key discourses, namely those of psychoanalysis and embodiment and their relationship to trauma and subjectivity. In my examination of these different novels, I identify and analyse the recurring and insistent tendency the texts exhibit to create substitutes and replacements at the levels of narrative and figuration. These patterns of substitution operate both within the novels as a dominant recurring motif, and in their very production and publication: each novel offers both a substitute version of the event, as well as representing a material artefact to stand in for the losses of 9/11. Therefore, my negotiation in the thesis is necessarily focussed on the circulations between reality and fiction, because those crucial and illuminating moves are mirrored in the novels themselves. Such a negotiation leads us to investigate the ways in which the novels of 9/11 stage and re-substantiate the event, taking up the real and the imaginary in the complex and peculiar engagement of making art from trauma.12
As a touchstone for my analysis throughout the thesis, I draw on the well- known “Tribute in Light” memorial, which literally illuminates the palimpsestic, aesthetic, representational dilemmas of 9/11. Conceptualised in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, and enacted in March 2002 on their six-month anniversary,13 the “Tribute in Light” installation featured two large beams of light that were projected into the voids left by the Twin Towers in Lower
10 See, for example, Sara Paretsky, Black List. (New York: Penguin, 2003) and S. J. Rozan, Absent Friends, (New York: Delacorte Press, 2005). 11 For example, Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, (New York: Harper Collins, 2006). 12 The controversy surrounding the comments of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen who said that 9/11 was “the greatest work of art” speaks to the highly charged atmosphere concerning the delineation between the terms ‘art’ and ‘trauma’. For insightful discussions on the Stockhausen statement, see Miles Orvell, “After 9/11: Photography, the Destructive Sublime, and the Postmodern Archive.” Michigan Quarterly Review 45.2 (2006): 245 and Richard Schechner, “9/11 as Avant-Garde Art?” PMLA 124.5 (2009): 1824-1826. 13 The “Tribute in Light” memorial has since been on display annually; see for example, David W. Dunlap, “Twin Beams to Light Sky Again. But after 2008?” New York Times 9 September 2006, Late (East Coast) ed.: B7 and Robin Finn, “From Disco Floors to Skylines, Illuminating Life.” New York Times 29 March 2002, Late (East Coast) ed.: B2. 11
Manhattan. These light beams formed two ghostly and ephemeral skyscrapers; eerily resembling their fallen counterparts in a haunting display (see fig 1.1). This installation symbolised a desire for recovering the lost figures, but also a crucial doubling in and of itself; a re-creation of the Towers.14 These apparition- like Towers establish the overdetermination of the real and the symbolic at the very site of Ground Zero, and highlight the various problematics faced by artists in the aftermath that this thesis investigates.15 In such a way, the “Tribute in Light” memorial stands at the interstices of the problematics of re- inscribing or remembering trauma through art.16
When critic James Wood asks whether the brutal change to the city of New York will also alter the ways in which the American novel is written, he draws together the domains of the real and the imaginary. Any analysis of 9/11 literature requires constant attention to the negotiation between these domains of historical facticity and fiction both as these are taken up in the novels and as they pertain to critical analysis. While the reflexivity of real and imaginary domains is a commonplace of literary and cultural studies, it is the specific relations that promise to elucidate the role of fiction in this particular cultural context.
A primary dilemma highlighted by the “Tribute in Light” exhibit is the literal exemplification of the wish to offer substitutes or proxies after 9/11; to rebuild what was lost in reality and in the symbolic domain. Indeed, one of the designers of the tribute, architect and filmmaker Gustavo Bonevardi, writes that the memorial works to “create a link between ourselves and what was lost. In so doing, we believed, we could also repair, in part, our city’s identity and ourselves” (para 5). The merging of real and psychic desire as articulated by
14 In a similar form of virtual rebuilding, the temporary memorial created at the site of Ground Zero, named “Reflecting Absence”, features two pools of water where each tower stood, where visitors can see “watery reflections of the buildings that no longer tower above”; Herbert Muschamp, “Strong Depth of Emotion and No Frills in 2 Footprints.” The New York Times 15 January 2004, Late (East Coast) ed.: B1. 15 For a brief summary of the insistence of the Twin Towers on the cover art of the novels of 9/11, see Appendix III. 16 For an insightful account of mourning after 9/11, see Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, (London, New York: Verso, 2004). Critic Meghan O’Rourke also notes that “In the wake of... 9/11, the conversation about death in the United States has grown more open”; O’Rourke, “Good Grief: Is There a Better Way to Be Bereaved?” The New Yorker 1 February, 2010: 68. 12
Bonevardi is highlighted in the novels of 9/11, which construct fictionalised, substitute versions of New York City and 9/11 and seek, if only in the imagination, to undo the damages sustained. As author Ulrich Baer notes: [a]fter a great catastrophe... the functions of language and thought necessary for remembrance and reflection seem permanently disabled. Even if it ultimately collapses into a stutter, or vanishes in a line break or ellipsis, the story of this new condition for making sense also needs to be recovered (4).
The recovery of this “new condition” is the imperative that underlies the novels of 9/11, and suggests the desire to narrativise 9/11; to create substitute versions of the event within fiction. In this way, it is better for the inarticulate utterance, to which Baer alludes, to be put into words rather than to be left unsaid.
Fig 1.1 LEFT: The Twin Towers before the event of 9/11.17 RIGHT: The “Tribute in Light” memorial.18
This trope of substitution, so well exemplified in the “Tribute in Light” memorial, recurs across the novels of 9/11 and is made manifest in terms of both repeating symbols, such as the focus on twins and simulacra, and more broadly at the level of narrative with the wishes to repeat, replace and undo. Crucially, the repeated textual substitutions in 9/11 novels are always paradoxical in nature. In fact, the “Tribute in Light” memorial demonstrates this paradoxical pattern of re-inscribing the event of 9/11: its symbolic power lies in recreating the spectre of the Towers, yet the apparition of presence ultimately works to reinforce and underscore their absence. Therefore, the haunting
17 Online image: http://library.thinkquest.org/TQ0311600/HomePage.htm (accessed 23 October, 2009). 18 Online image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wtc-2004-memorial.jpg (accessed 23 October, 2009). 13 nature of the memorial is entirely dependent upon the tension between absence and presence, as it desires the return of the Towers, while simultaneously mourning their disappearance.
In light of these complex and self-reflexive tensions, my analysis of the practice of substitution in the novels of 9/11 is organised around three related paradoxes emanating from the event itself, which dictate what the thesis identifies as particular, recurring patterns within the fiction. Indeed, using paradoxes to understand the novels reminds us of Jenny Edkins’ notion of “encircling the trauma” (15) in relation to the event of 9/11: they speak to the manifold difficulties and contradictions inherent in addressing the tragedy directly. Drawing on Slavoj i ek’s work on trauma and its elision,19 Edkins proposes that the only option of reinscribing trauma is to “encircle again and again” the site in order to “mark it in its very impossibility” (15). In the domain of literature, paradoxes, then, offer a framework whereby aftermath storytelling can be examined in inclusive ways that take into account, for example, the myriad problems of speech, the shock of the attack and the implications associated with claiming the experience as one’s own. I argue that the figure of the paradox allows us to analyse the various and contradictory strictures within which the novels are circumscribed. Indeed, it is these deeply contextual issues, such as the controversial nature of articulating anything other than sanctioned narratives of patriotism, sacrifice and freedom20 that inform the publication and nature of the novels themselves; so deeply reflexive and reflective of their political, post-trauma environment.
By charting the paradoxes of 9/11 literature, we can map the repeated attempts to offer substitutes and replacements for various losses sustained in reality and in the symbolic domain. The first and most fundamental of these dilemmas is the need to speak after trauma, while acknowledging a simultaneous wish for silence and commemoration. Second, there is a complex relationship between acknowledging the specificity of the event and
19 See i ek, The Plague of Fantasies, (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 213-218. 20 Susan Willis and Phillip Bratta both examine the feverish, patriotic obsession of the aftermath in their respective articles; see Willis, “Old Glory.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002): 375-383 and Bratta, “Flag Display Post-9/11: A Discourse on American Nationalism.” The Journal of American Culture 32.3 (2009): 232-243. 14 the conflicting desire to universalise it. The third paradox of 9/11 is the reluctant acceptance the absence of the Twin Towers, which exists alongside the urgent wish to replace them and the people who died in the attacks. This web of paradoxical operations is itself circumscribed within a reflexive pattern that traverses the boundary of fiction and social context in the literature of 9/11.
This thesis will argue that the practice of reconstructing and re-inscribing the event of 9/11 within literature also operates as a form of writing collective memory. In literary practice, creating and reinforcing the mythology of which Simpson writes relies on the construction and dissemination of a shared and collective memory of 9/11. In his book National Trauma and Collective Memory, Arthur Neal suggests that collective memory is formed around a set of shared experiences and symbols, very often related to a traumatic catalyst (21). Grounding his analysis in specifically American acts of national trauma, Neal cites events such as Pearl Harbor, The Vietnam War, and the Oklahoma City bombing and claims that these particularly violent events prompted stories and accounts which “permit [the] linking [of] personal lives with historical circumstances” (20).
From this basis, I argue that it is narrative that facilitates the connection between the personal and the historical in 9/11 literature. As anthropologists Paul Antze and Michael Lambek write of the connection between individual, community and narrative: “[p]ersonal memory is always connected to social narrative as is social memory to the personal. The self and the community are the imagined products of a continuous process” (xx). As such, the literature of 9/11 can be read as enabling and authorising collective accounts of an historical event; mediating and negotiating the often fraught memorialisation of tragedy. Neal also suggests that this gathering occurs around the creation of a “body of sacred symbols” and that the “role of trauma in the creation of these symbols is evident” (21). The symbols from which these accounts stem are, writes Neal, monuments such as the “Arlington Cemetery, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the 15
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” (19). The monument of Ground Zero has been imbued with similarly ‘sacred’ aspects that are taken up within the novels.21
My analysis of collective memory and sacred symbols will be used as a lens through which to view the relationships between the event of 9/11 and the ensuing fiction. I will argue that the novels of 9/11 take up, demonstrate and often subvert this collective memory, reinforcing the paradoxes outlined. Indeed, cultural anthropologist Allen Feldman notes that on 9/11, collective memory “was momentarily suspended like a stopwatch”, leaving a “flood of undigested visions and effects” (111). Such collective memories, according to Peter Novick, work to “suffuse group consciousness” (The Holocaust in American Life, 170) and “reduce events to mythic archetypes” (3). Novick claims that the cultural construction of the Holocaust fulfils “a need for a consensual symbol” (7) under which a community could unite.
Drawing on such an idea, I argue that the event of 9/11, too, has come to act as a symbolic and powerful cultural construct. In this way, the novels of 9/11 draw on the real and symbolic power of the event in order to reiterate, re- frame or unsettle its collective memory. As Novick notes, for a collective memory to take hold in the first place, it has to “resonate with how we understand ourselves” (170) and that this relationship becomes circular, as “[w]e embrace a memory because it speaks to our condition; to the extent that we embrace it, we establish a framework of interpreting that condition” (170). This circularity is of course also reinforced by the very genre of 9/11 literature, which retells the event and imposes a specific understanding according to its
21 The ways in which the police department declared the site of Ground Zero as sacred and the souvenirs as ”ceremonial debris” also speak to the complex processes of marketing and commodifying the event in the aftermath. For an insightful analysis of the contradictory constructions of 9/11 in this way, see Dana Heller (ed.) The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Marita Sturken also offers a thoughtful account of the production of sacralised space. See Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero.” American Ethnologist 31.3 (2004): 314-315. Further, theorist Bill Brown makes connections between trauma and the sacred, symbolic aspects of the event, calling it a “sacralized mass murder”; Brown, “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory).” PMLA 120.3 (2005): 734. Daniel Harris also writes extensively on how the event of 9/11 was staged and exploited. He suggests, for instance, that there was a “selectivity of the roll call of the martyrs” chosen and that, for example, “we found the deaths of the emergency personnel far more riveting than the deaths of the office workers, even though the latter outnumbered the former by a ratio of approximately 12 to 1”; Harris, “The Kitschification of Sept. 11.” Salon.com, 2002, 2. 16 own particular agenda. Given the amount of uncertainty concerning how to interpret the event,22 this collective memory serves as an especially important aspect of the oeuvre of 9/11 fiction in particular.
In order to understand better the specificity of the literary response to 9/11, it is illuminating to contrast the event of 9/11 with the July 2005 underground bombings in London. Despite the vast differences in the scale of these two events, both events were surprise attacks perpetrated in major cities of global dominance by fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. Yet the literary and social response from the two could not have been more different. In the literature of 9/11, many authors understood the effects on New York City to be vast and the attacks were perceived as being deeply connected to the psyche. New York novelist Don DeLillo wrote that after the attacks, writers needed to focus on “smaller objects and more marginal stories... to set against the massive spectacle that continues to seem unmanageable, too powerful a thing to set into our frame of practiced response” (“In the Ruins of the Future”, 35). By contrast, the London bombings in 2005, which also took place in a large, modern city, did not elicit the same levels of shock or disbelief in commentary and reportage: they instead focused on the motivations for the attack, and the practical responses necessary.23 In fact, Frank Furedi went as far to comment on the “calm, almost matter-of-fact, response to the violence” (“Fear? We're Revelling in It”, 18) displayed by Londoners. As British novelist Ian McEwan wrote in an opinion piece in the immediate aftermath of the attack, there was an “air of weary inevitability” relating to the London events, and it “looked familiar, as though it happened long ago” (A23).
22 For instance well-known trauma theorist Dori Laub wrote in the aftermath, “September 11 was an encounter with something that makes no sense, an event that fits in nowhere”; Laub, “September 11, 2001 - an Event without a Voice.” Trauma at Home: After 9/11, Ed. Judith Greenberg, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 204. Similarly, Lorraine Daston claims, “[n]ever have world-shattering events been so relentlessly documented, the evidence of testimony converging with the hideous evidence of things. Yet I still cannot at some level believe what I have seen and heard”; Daston, “11 September - Roundtable Discussion.” London Review of Books 23.19 (2001), para 4. 23 See, for example, Simon Crompton, “Risk: Take It in Hand.” The Times 16 July 2005: 21; Jonathan Glover, “Dialogue Is the Only Way to End This Cycle of Violence.” The Guardian 27 July 2005: 22; and David Gardner, “The Politics of Wounded Identity.” Financial Times 29 July 2005: 17. 17
One reason for such antithetical responses in the two cities comes from their respective histories and identities. Crucially, the city of London is steeped in historical violence perpetrated by “the other”, such as the Blitz in World War II and even more recently, attacks perpetrated by the I.R.A. over decades.24 As McEwan again writes of the 2005 London bombings, “[h]ow could we have forgotten that this [attack] was always going to happen?” (A23). The idea that violence in London “was always going to happen” is very much at odds with the New York City that self-identified as infallible and, despite a foundational history of violence, only ever accepted and understood the notion of self- perpetrated change.25 As Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall write, “unlike the nation’s other early cities or many of the well-known Old World cities that exude a cherished past, New York rarely uses its history in constructing its identity” (3). Having regard to this history or lack thereof, the London attacks, even despite their dramatically smaller scale,26 were couched as iterative repetitions of violence, readily absorbed by the fabric of the city. The implication of such an identity construction for New York City and 9/11 novels opens up a literary avenue whereby authors could take up the real ruptures initiated by the event and reconstruct new versions of the city in literature.
These new versions of the city and the aftermath and the act of writing about 9/11 and tragedy itself present particular challenges for narrative. The modes by which the literature of 9/11 ascribes the event with meaning generally conform to a type of traumatic representation. E. Ann Kaplan writes in Trauma Culture that the event of 9/11 “demonstrates the difficulties of generalizing about trauma and its impact” (1) due to the way in which trauma theory tends not to be able to differentiate between individualised reactions and contexts. Despite this problem, it is clear that the reconstructed, artificial stories of the trauma of 9/11 all contain an “imperative to speak, and a determination to find
24 For an analysis of I.R.A. violence see especially Stephen Graham, (ed). Cities, War and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics, (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 8-10 and Jon Coaffee, Terrorism, Risk and the City: The Making of a Contemporary Urban Landscape, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 75-79. 25 Thomas Bender writes extensively on this subject in The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 2002). 26 Laura Smith and Robert Booth. “Attack on London: Toll Reaches 54 as More Bodies Found in Tunnel,” The Guardian 15 July 2005, 6. 18 ways of speaking that remain true to the trauma” (Edkins, 15). This “imperative to speak” is revealed in the various and recurring demonstrations within the novels of 9/11 of techniques such as compulsion and authorial ambivalence or arrest, that attest to the paradoxical iterations of traumatic representation within the fictional domain. Literary theorist Richard Gray notes that such representation is a “recalibration of feeling so violent and radical that it resists and compels memory, generating stories that cannot, yet must, be told” (129). These conflicting pulls of fixation and paralysis gesture more broadly to the problematics of commemoration and re-inscription. Much of the literature appropriating and fictionalising the event of 9/11 therefore stands uneasily between two poles: the revulsion at turning the event into art, and the urgent imperative to do so. Such an imperative reveals another crucial site of literary anxiety: can language mediate and represent the powerful images of 9/11? This dilemma, so particular to the literary field, reinforces the need for this thesis to interrogate the real and the symbolic domains, crossing over the domains of facticity and fiction.
The Novels of 9/11 In light of both the vast volume of work published on 9/11 and the dilemma of representing and mediating the images of 9/11, I have selected a broad cross- section of American novels27 that incorporate and fictionalise the event of 9/11 in a substantial way and form a discrete genre. The novels selected span a significantly distinct time, from the year 2003 to 2007 in terms of their publication dates. The earlier date designates the first publication date of a work of 9/11 literature and the following years as the period of the aftermath, and I have chosen this timeframe and particular selection of novels as a sample of the entire oeuvre. In fact, at the end of this time period in 2007, literary critic Dave Itzkoff noted of William Gibson’s novel Spook Country (2007) – the successor to his 9/11 novel, Pattern Recognition (2003) – that it could be termed “more than a post-9/11 novel” and in fact, could be “the first example of the post-post-9/11 novel” (12). Such a claim acknowledges the sense that, by this stage, the event of 9/11 was less of a focus on novels, and
27 For a précis of the texts I analyse in this thesis see Appendix I. 19 certainly not addressed in the same way.28 Further, it offers us a clear demarcation of the end of the post-9/11 genre and the beginning of another.
My selection of novels encompasses a diverse range of various and different engagements with the event of 9/11, and this particular array of novels illuminate the problematics of using postmodern conventions to narrativise the event of 9/11.29 In the United States, home of the great postmodern literary innovators, 9/11 has prompted a re-evaluation of postmodern ways of storytelling, and insisted authors rebuild a literary construction between art and the event. Indeed, the key concerns of postmodernism, such as bodies, narratives, the city and time, are all central to the narrativisation of the event of 9/11. The dilemmas performed in the novels reveal fiction at a point of crisis and take up these postmodern concerns: if bodies drive narrative, what do we do when there are no bodies left? If our novels are steeped in the city, how can we write when the city is injured? How can we narrativise time when trauma disrupts it? The novelists of 9/11, therefore, needed to re-think their engagements with the body, city, and time, and refigure their novels in ways that answer – or at least attempt to – these challenges. In light of these problematics, my selection of texts in this thesis highlights these postmodern engagements, and demonstrates across a broad range of texts the diverse types of disruptions to narrative and postmodern constructs.
These varied novels represent crucial and different engagements with and challenges to the postmodern, and when taken as a whole, can chart the
28 One of the better known novels that features 9/11, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, was published in 2008, and has been lauded as “one of the finest novels of the post-9/11 condition”; Michael Rothberg, “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Grey” American Literary History 21.1 (2009): 156. While containing events which unfold in the aftermath of the event, the novel is, as Zadie Smith notes, “only superficially about September 11”; Smith, “Two Paths for the Novel,” The New York Review of Books 55.18 (2008): 47. Rather, it is far more pre-occupied with race, post-colonialism and providing a new version and vision of America. Critic James Wood called Netherland “one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read”; Wood, “Beyond a Boundary,” The New Yorker 26 May 2008: 78. It is also outside the ambit of this thesis, as O’Neill is an Irishman, and I will be focusing on American authors. 29 I write with an awareness of the debates surrounding what constitutes the ‘literature of 9/11’. As Charles Lewis argues, “any inventory of 9/11 literature could be neither stable, exclusive, nor exhaustive, especially as that date becomes more distant and its consequences continue to unfold”; Lewis, “Real Planes and Imaginary Towers: Philip Roth's The Plot Against America as 9/11 Prosthetic Screen.” Literature after 9/11. Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 249. 20 common themes and concerns of the genre of 9/11 fiction. Importantly, the texts do not adhere or subscribe to one reading: at times they stand in stark contrast and opposition to one another, and very often contradict themselves. Further, my selection of novels is of course a cultural construct: there are many other 9/11 novels that will be outside the ambit of my inquiry.30 This thesis is concerned with ten American texts written by predominantly New York-based novelists, some of whom, such as Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Art Spiegelman and Jonathan Safran Foer, are Jewish-American.31 This selection of aftermath novels will allow me to chart the various fictional strategies deployed and the ways in which they reconstruct and narrativise the event of 9/11. Further, they directly enable a reading of the paradoxical relationships across a highly diverse range of literary devices, authors and subject matter.
I will focus on four primary novels: William Gibson’s futuristic Pattern Recognition (2003), Jonathan Safran Foer’s inventive Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Jess Walter’s comic The Zero (2006) and Don DeLillo’s solemn Falling Man (2007). These novels, disparate in their style, structure and genre, represent four postmodern authors’ attempts to re- imagine their novelistic conventions after 9/11. For DeLillo and Gibson, two canonical postmodernists, 9/11 presents the peculiar challenge of having to write disaster when they have already created landscapes of terror and frightening, alternative realities respectively. DeLillo, for instance, wrote in Mao II (1991), “there is a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists... Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture.
30 There have been many novels written by non-American authors, for instance, that fall outside the scope of this thesis. Most notably is French novelist Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World, (London: Fourth Estate, 2004). There has also been some scholarly criticism on non-American fictional engagements on the event; see, for example, Cara Cilano, ed. From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the US, (New York, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), and Richard Carr, ““A World Of... Risk, Passion, Intensity, and Tragedy”: The Post-9/11 Australian Novel” Antipodes 23.1 (2009): 63-66. For a chronology of the American novels of 9/11, see Appendix II. 31 This both speaks to the particular historical Jewish sensitivity to trauma, and the ethnic demographics of New York City itself. For an analysis, for example, of the markedly different African American response to 9/11, see Dwonna Goldstone, “An African American Professor Reflects on What 9/11 Meant for African Americans, and Herself.” The Journal of American Culture 28.1 (2005): 29-34 and Lanita Jacobs-Huey, ““The Arab Is the New Nigger”: African American Comics Confront the Irony and Tragedy of September 11.” Transforming Anthropology 14.1 (2006): 60-64. Roger Simon also explains the radically different racial reaction of Middle Eastern and Latino immigrants in his article; Simon, “Altering the “Inner Life of the Culture”: Monstrous Memory and the Persistence of 9/11.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30.3 (2008): 354-357. 21
Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory” (41). Similarly, science fiction novelist William Gibson, most famous for his cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), turned to reality after 9/11, commenting that his science fiction scaffolding, which usually supports “imaginary futures”, can be used to mediate the “unthinkable present” (Silverblatt) of a post-9/11 world. Gibson said in an interview, “I have this conviction that the present is actually inexpressibly peculiar now, and that’s the only thing that’s worth dealing with” (Leonard). Using the tools of science fiction, the seemingly futuristic thriller, Pattern Recognition, is in fact very much anchored in the present, much like DeLillo’s Falling Man. Both Falling Man and Pattern Recognition have been well received critically,32 although DeLillo’s novel garnered a degree of criticism for being less than his usual offerings that so accurately capture the Zeitgeist.33 These two novels especially are representative of the uncanny dilemma of having to write about that which was previously only conceived of – and allowed – in the imagination, which I will go on to analyse in the third chapter of this thesis.
While the challenge for established writers like Gibson and DeLillo is to create alternative modes of representation in the aftermath, the task for younger, less experienced writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Jess Walter is to innovate against the broader movement of postmodernism itself. One of the most celebrated and well-known novels of the 9/11 genre,34 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, while often misunderstood by critics,35 utilises images, distorted text, a flip book and a precocious child narrator as highly self- conscious scaffolding in order to narrativise grief and confusion in the
32 For a range of book reviews on Pattern Recognition see, for example, Lisa Zeidner, “Netscape.” The New York Times Book Review 19 January 2003: 7, Toby Litt, “Back to the 80s.” The Guardian 26 April 2003: 26, Paul Di Filippo, “Prophets and Losses.” The Washington Post 2 February, 2003: BW04, Michael Berry, “Breaking the ‘Pattern’.” The San Francisco Chronicle 2 February, 2003: M3 and Jon Casimir, “An Extra Dimension.” The Sydney Morning Herald 2007, sec. Spectrum: 29. 33 See, for example, Tim Adams, “The Sage of 9/11.” Review. The Sydney Morning Herald 9 June 2007, sec. Spectrum: 34-35, Tom Junod, “The Man Who Invented 9/11.” Esquire (2007) and Anthony Macris, “Twin Towers Take a Lifestyle with Them.” Review. The Sydney Morning Herald 16-17 June 2007, sec. Spectrum: 36-37. 34 Walter Kirn, “‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’: Everything Is Included.” New York Times 3 April 2005, Late Edition - Final ed., sec. 7: 1, Francine Prose, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Review).” People Weekly 11 April 2005: 51 and Deborah Solomon, “The Rescue Artist.” The New York Times Magazine 27 February 2005: 40-44. 35 See, for example, B. R. Myers, “A Bag of Tired Tricks: Blank Pages? Photos of Mating Tortoises? The Death Throes of the Postmodern Novel.” The Atlantic Monthly 295.4 (2005): 115-121, and John Updike, “Mixed Messages.” The New Yorker 81.4 (2005): 138. 22 aftermath of 9/11, or as the novel names it, “the worst day” (12). Working against similar problematics regarding representing trauma, Walter’s novel The Zero is narrated by a suicidal ex-policeman, Brian Remy, who worked at Ground Zero, but who now has amnesia. Remy’s narrative contains extreme shifts and slippages between time and space, underlining both his sense of post-9/11 discombobulation and the difficulty of re-inscribing trauma in a linear manner.36 Both of these unreliable narrations draw attention to their constructed nature: they are literary artefacts that underscore their ambivalence about narrating the event of 9/11.
The thesis also draws on six secondary novels: Joyce Maynard’s teen fiction novel The Usual Rules (2003), Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Patrick McGrath’s historical trilogy Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (2005),37 Michael Cunningham’s trilogy Specimen Days (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s mournful The Writing on the Wall (2005) and Jay McInerney’s social satire The Good Life (2006). The recurring dilemmas which range across this wide selection of 9/11 novels suggest the difficulty of representing trauma in art, and, at different times, the failures and successes of attempting to do so. Further, these dilemmas go to the very heart of these literary projects, and the wide range of novels identify particular tropes, structures and narrative techniques by and on which a claim to a specific genre of 9/11 literature can be made.
Crucially, many of these novels also represent engagements with particularly postmodern tropes, such as the metafictional incorporation of quotes from real-life politicians such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for example, in the deeply linguistically aware The Writing on the Wall. Joyce Maynard’s novel, The Usual Rules, while not especially postmodern in style or tone, is one of the first to be published on 9/11 and subverts the usual trope of 9/11
36 See Janet Maslin, “After the Cataclysm, a Surreal Drift of Failing Senses.” New York Times 11 September 2006, Late (East Coast) ed.: C6. 37 Patrick McGrath is British by birth, but has lived in New York City since 1981 and no longer self-identifies as wholly British. See, for example, Nicholas Wroe, “All in the Mind.” The Guardian 12 July 2008, sec. Features and Reviews: 12. 23 novels of a father dying:38 here the protagonist’s mother dies.39 Also Maynard’s narrative contains a complex temporal structure, which will be analysed in the third chapter of the thesis.
Further, each 9/11 novel selected shows a unique engagement with the postmodern through the ways in which it stands out from the rest of the respective novelist’s oeuvre. For instance, Jay McInerney’s social satire The Good Life is a long-awaited sequel to his 1993 novel Brightness Falls. Here, McInerney resurrects old, early-90s post-recession characters and re-creates their troubles anew in a ruptured, post-9/11 world.40 Similarly, artist Art Spiegelman, best know for his graphic novel adaptation of his family’s Holocaust story, Maus, must represent a new, seemingly unimaginable trauma in In the Shadow of No Towers. In this graphic novel, Spiegelman self- consciously underlines the challenges he faces in so doing, and writes, “I work too slowly to respond to transient events while they’re happening. (It took me 13 years to grapple with World War II in Maus!)” (ii). These literary engagements demonstrate a compulsion to write 9/11, and underscore the need to do so through highly different modes than those employed previously in the novelist’s work.
While the mode of representation can differ, symbolic elements, too, can demonstrate a change in writing after 9/11. Novelist Michael Cunningham’s best known novel, The Hours, published in 2002, featured a ghost-like Virginia Woolf haunting the novel. Moving to a specifically American haunting, Cunningham’s post-9/11 novel Specimen Days,41 uses the character of Walt
38 See for example, William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, (London: Penguin Books, 2003), Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), and Patrick McGrath, Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005). 39 In fact, the bulk of criticism directed at Maynard’s novel centres on the loss of the mother. See, for example, Karen Karbo, “Lost Girl.” New York Times 16 February 2003: Late (East Coast) ed.: 15 and Susan Dooley, “Motherless Child.” Washington Post 2 March 2003: BW13. 40 The Good Life has also received a relatively positive critical response: see for example, Mark Mordue, “A Spark of Life under the Rubble.” Review. The Sydney Morning Herald 11-12 March 2006, sec. Spectrum: 23. 41 For a range of opinion concerning the critical reception of Cunningham’s Specimen Days, see Terrence Rafferty, “Manahatta My City.” The New York Times 26 June 2005, Late (East Coast) ed., sec. 7: 12, Michiko Kakutani, “A Poet as Guest at a Party of Misfits.” New York Times 14 June 2005: Late (East Coast) ed.: E1 and Jacqueline Rose, “Entryism.” London Review of Books 27.18 (2005): 25-26. 24
Whitman, who recurs as an emblematic figure of American resilience in the novel, invoking a layered and particularly post-9/11 sense of nationalism. Similarly, the other historical trilogy in my selection, Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now also appears to be a revisitation of some of McGrath’s previous Gothic and psychoanalytic novels, such as Asylum (1996) and Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution (2000), yet the deployment of the tropes of recurrent terrorism and territorial violence distinguish Ghost Town.42
All ten novels interrogate issues of trauma specific to the event of 9/11 through the continual displacement and replacement demonstrated both in the narrative structure and the patterns of figuration employed. In this way, the novels utilise the background of New York City as a very particular urban landscape upon which to project the manifold and often antithetical traumas of 9/11, and do so through the avenues of temporal disjunctions, material ruptures and spatial disconnections. In these ways, the texts both reinforce and at times subvert conceptualisations of trauma and representation through the structure and tropes employed.
In these novels, I chart the similarities and differences in thematic preoccupation, tropes, desires, structure and metaphor, and how they relate both to paradoxes and substitutions. Importantly, these texts share some very similar structural concerns. In the introduction to a book of short stories on 9/11, entitled 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, editor Ulrich Baer writes, “[r]esolution proves elusive in these stories” (60) and such a statement can also be applied to many of the full-length works which comprise the literature of 9/11. Unsure of how to end the story – or indeed of how to provide closure for the protagonists – authors have very often left the endings of the novels in an unfinished or suspended state. This relates to the similar pattern within the novels of a refusal of linear narrative. Such patterns mirror the indeterminacy of the actual political situation resulting from 9/11, which appears to span an indefinite length of time, sans resolution, and suggests a pervading uncertainty that relates to the paradoxes articulated at the outset of
42 See Todd McEwen, “The City That Ate the World.” The Guardian 24 September 2005: 17. 25 this thesis. As W.J.T. Mitchell notes, “911… does not name the Event. It is Day One of an event whose days are unnumbered, indefinite, an emergency in which the emergent order has yet to make itself clear” (“911: Criticism and Crisis”, 568). Thus ‘the event of 9/11’ carries with it particular linguistic currency referring both to the day and its immeasurable traumatic aftermath. Such a textual tendency of course refers back to various primary narratives of loss within American literature, which range widely from early captivity narratives,43 stories of African American losses,44 canonical authorial45 accounts, Jewish American accounts of traumatic memory,46 and the immigrant experience.47
Considering these past narratives of loss in the American canon, the traumatic specificities of the event of 9/11 translate into some of the broad concerns of the novels. A particular trope that accompanies such a merging of reality into the domain of imagination is the loss of innocence, which interrogates whether 9/11 is the inaugural wounding of the United States or an iteration of woundings past. Indeed, cultural theorist Marita Sturken notes, “virtually every traumatic event of the 20th-century U.S. history, from Pearl Harbor48 to the Vietnam War, has been characterized as the moment when... innocence was
43 For a discussion on early American narratives of loss and captivity narratives in particular, see Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature 1787- 1845, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Susan Faludi also offers an examination of the “centuries-long trauma of assault on [America’s] home soil”. See Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 3. 44 An analysis of the intersection between real losses in the South and American literature can be found in Denise Shaw and Pamela Barnett’s instructive text; Shaw and Barnett, The Rape Narrative in the American South: A Psychoanalytical Examination of Sexual Violence and the Melancholic Internalization of Loss in the Modern Southern Novel, (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007). 45 Pamela Boker writes extensively on the ways the theme of loss recurs in canonical American novels. See, Boker, The Grief Taboo in American Literature: Loss and Prolonged Adolescence in Twain, Melville, and Hemingway: Volume 8 of Literature and Psychoanalysis, (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 46 Peter Novick’s texts are particularly instructive here. See Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and The Holocaust and Collective Memory, (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). For a more recent discussion of the particularities of Jewish American loss, see Victoria Aarons, “The Task of Memory: American Jewish Writers and the Complexities of Transmission.” Contemporary Literature 49.2 (2008): 300-306. 47 Richard Gray offers an account of immigrant narratives; Gray, “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis.” American Literary History 21.1 (2009): 128-151. 48 Marcia Landy writes on the connections between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. See Landy, ““America under Attack”: Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and History in the Media.” Film and Television after 9/11. Ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 79-100. 26 lost” (“The Aesthetics of Absence”, 311). In this way, the traditional American trope of innocence and its loss, here seen with the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’ being so flagrantly violated in one of the premier cities of the world, is taken up in literary forms. Correspondingly, many novelists re- enact the actual destruction of the towers, for example, and this is further fictionalised with deaths or characters having to ‘grow up’ in the aftermath of 9/11. This leads also to fictional fears concerning the vulnerability of the body within the new urban life of terror; a theme more familiar to places far more used to common bloodshed than a city like New York. Finally, substantial anxieties concerning how to articulate loss adequately and appropriately abound within the novels, and the idea is played out through the characters, who struggle to give the event words. Further, this idea extends to the novelists themselves, as they endeavour literally to put the event into writing. I will analyse the range of 9/11 novels in this thesis in terms of their paradoxical iterations of their traumatic representation within the fictional domain, which I will introduce here.
Speech and Silence The first paradox contained within the novels of 9/11 is the simultaneous desire to speak and to remain silent, which manifests in individual speech acts, as literary artefact and as a cultural industry. This tension relates to reconstructing reflexive versions of the event in literature and substitution, as the performance of speech seeks to replace the overwhelming absence with presence. The novels examined in this thesis sit uneasily between these two dichotomous poles, at times retelling and reinscribing the event of 9/11, and at others performing a studied silence. I will analyse the ways this paradox is played out within the fiction in two primary manifestations, the first of which is the ambivalence concerning attempts to speak after trauma and the second is the fear that speech might fail to be an adequate vehicle through which to represent the horror of the event.
The fact that the memory of trauma often appears incommunicable in this instance leads to the first demonstration of the speech and silence paradox, which manifests in the contradictory (and sometimes simultaneous) textual 27 impulses of hesitation and compulsion. It is crucial to note that there are three primary positions for writers after 9/11: those who wrote about the event, those who did not write about the event,49 and those who wrote about not writing about the event: who performed a studied silence or who only alluded to the event in their novels.50 These categories of novelists themselves suggest the fraught environment for writers in the aftermath of 9/11. In fact, speaking to these problematics of using speech to encompass the extent of the event, the overtly silent “Tribute in Light” memorial underlines the manifold difficulties of speaking against the heavy images of 9/11. Another of its designers, Michael Ahern, said, “[o]ne of the best things about this [memorial] is that it is what it is. There are no speeches attendant to it” (Dunlap, B7). Such a belief underscores the tension between speech and silence: when an event such as 9/11 holds dominion over words, what more is there left to say? Part of the hesitation in speaking or writing after trauma is also related to the fact that speech in the aftermath is often subject to penalty.51 As James Der Derian writes, post-9/11, “there was very little that was safe to say” (“9/11: Before, after and in Between”, 175). The implicit and explicit sanctions relating to speech after trauma also signify the fraught atmosphere for the publication of novels. W.J.T. Mitchell writes of publishing in the aftermath of 9/11, “[w]hat point, then, could there be in producing a timely utterance that will be outdated by the time it is heard? How can we know, as we write in this moment of “hot”
49 Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth are, for example, two canonical American novelists who chose not to write on the event itself. Roth said in an interview, “[f]ifty years ago... the best writers were not terribly engaged by the immediate present... But now the situation has changed. I would use 9/11 as an example. People feel challenged by it. How can they do it, how can they work it in?"; James Marcus, “Philip Roth, on Writing and Being Ticked Off.” Los Angeles Times 14 September 2008, A6. Crucially, Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, while not about the event of 9/11 directly, has been read as having “historical, thematic, and figurative evocations for the post-9/11 reader”; Charles Lewis, “Real Planes and Imaginary Towers: Philip Roth's The Plot Against America as 9/11 Prosthetic Screen”, Literature after 9/11, Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 246. Jonathan Lethem also comments that his novel Chronic City (2009) set in New York City draws on the re-election of George Bush in 2004 and 9/11 as its “point of origin”, but that he “didn’t want either of those public facts to be explicit subjects in the book”; Michael Silverblatt, Interview with Jonathan Lethem. “Bookworm” KCRW Radio, Santa Monica, Rec 29th January, 2010. 50 For instance, influential postmodernist and New York author Paul Auster ended his novel The Brooklyn Follies with a proleptic description of 9/11 in the last two pages; Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 303-304. 51 The anxiety concerning speech in the aftermath of 9/11 was demonstrated very publicly in a critical debate between Cambridge classicist Mary Beard and Stanford poetry critic Marjorie Perloff. See Mary Beard, “11 September - Roundtable Discussion.” London Review of Books 23.19 4 October (2001) and Marjorie Perloff, “Letters.” London Review of Books 23.20 18 October (2001). 28 historical time, what will have been the right thing to say?” (“911: Criticism and Crisis”, 567). Such an ambivalence relating to how and when we should speak after 9/11 surrounds the fiction, and accounts for the structural and narrative operations employed across the range of novels, such as the recurrent use of analepsis and prolepsis, which seeks to portray the event only in past or future terms: never in the present tense.
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer acknowledges the compulsion to write in the aftermath, and notes “risks associated with writing about Sept. 11” (Memmott, D5) but comments on his authorial role by saying: I'd rather bite off more than I can chew than not bite off enough. In a way, the harder question to answer, for me, is: Why isn't everybody writing about it?... I think people are really afraid of art, but that's not a reason not to push on (Memmott, D5).
The fear of writing and the opposing compulsion to write, to “bite off more than [he] can chew” underscores the complex environment for novelists after 9/11. Political theorist Lisa Anderson writes of this tension, “[post-9/11, m]any of the authors decry a rush to judgment, but most seem to have felt the need to say something, even if it might later prove ill-considered” (304). The negotiation of the tension between speaking and staying silent necessarily involves understanding the risks involved; to offer a narrative despite being cognisant of the difficulties inherent in so doing. The very act of re-imagining the event involves particular attention to the political and social climate of the aftermath of 9/11, and I argue that the novels of 9/11 maintain a degree of knowingness about their status as a potentially controversial piece of art.
The compulsion to speak after 9/11 leads to the second manifestation of the speech and silence paradox, which is the fear that speech will in fact fail to communicate adequately the traumas sustained. In fact, the act of writing trauma has a contested and at times controversial history,52 and W.J.T.
52 The literature on inscribing trauma is of course vast. See, for example, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, (New York: Routledge, 1992); Cathy Caruth. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Leigh Gilmore, “Trauma, Self- Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 24.1 (2001): 128-140 and E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in 29
Mitchell suggests of 9/11’s aftermath that the “flood of images overwhelms language so completely that the Event itself seems almost unnameable” (“911: Criticism and Crisis”, 568). The internal contradiction of the “flood of images” being “unnameable” underlines the problems of adequately representing a seemingly incommensurable event: the very process of representation is itself mired in paradox. Given these problematics, I draw on i ek’s conception in his work Plague of Fantasies, where he suggests that at best, trauma’s subject can only approach its ultimate truth “asymptotically” (216), and that otherwise, the articulation of trauma would forever be “failed, a bone stuck in the throat of the speaking being which makes it impossible to ‘tell everything’” (216).
These limitations of language when faced with an overwhelming “flood of images” again recall the “Tribute in Light” memorial, which highlights the particularly postmodern tension between image and text.53 Given the difficulties of speech after a traumatic event and the overwhelming power and cinematic quality of the images of 9/11, I argue 9/11 novelists faced a peculiar challenge: if a picture is worth a thousand words, what sort of literary currency would be necessary to counter, or at least meet, the horrifying and breathtaking images of bodies falling and of planes flying into buildings?54 In this way, paradoxes also pervade the very act of commemoration and of speech in the aftermath. For in order to offer narratives about 9/11, by definition novelists had to translate the event into words and to find a vocabulary with which to describe the seemingly indescribable or inconceivable. The tension between image and text and the proliferation of the
Media and Literature, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 53 This tension is well-illustrated with the two versions of The 9/11 Commission Report. In 2004, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States published The 9/11 Commission Report detailing the lead-up and the history to the attacks; Zelikow, Jenkins and May, The 9/11 Commission Report, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004). In 2006, graphic novelists Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón published The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, which is an exact rendering of the Report in pictorial form; Jacobson and Colón, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). See Appendix IV for two pages of Jacobson and Colón’s work. 54 Tom Junod’s article interrogates the power of the images of 9/11, and in particular that of the poignant ‘falling man’ photograph; Junod, “The Falling Man.” Esquire, (1 Sept 2003), (accessed 21 April 2007). Further, literature theorist Daniel Lea interrogates this tension and posits, “What... does the novelist have to offer that cannot be provided by reportage or political commentary?”; Lea, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Anglo-American Writers' Responses to September 11.” Symbiosis 11.2 (2007): 3. 30 mediated image pervades the novels, in ways that suggest a highly unusual dilemma of representation.
This distinct hesitancy concerning the ability of literature to represent 9/11 is also taken up in the critical field. In an essay published months after the attacks, Don DeLillo wrote, “[t]he event [of 9/11] itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile. We have to take the shock and horror as it is” (“In the Ruins of the Future”, 39). Indeed, DeLillo’s own 9/11 novel, Falling Man (2007), took another six years to be published. Critic Andrew O’Hagan reinforced the notion that traditional modes of literary figuration were inappropriate or even tasteless to capture the horror of the event. In 2007, he wrote in the New York Review of Books: Those authors who published journalistic accounts immediately after the event failed to see how their metaphors fell dead from their mouths before the astonishing live pictures. It did not help us to be told by imaginative writers that the second plane was like someone posting a letter. No, it wasn’t. It was like a passenger jet crashing into an office building. It gave us nothing to be told that the South Tower came down like an elevator at full speed. No it didn’t. It collapsed like a building that could no longer hold itself up. Metaphor failed to do anything but make one feel that those keen to deploy it had not been watching enough television (para 20).
Here, O’Hagan suggests that the powerful images of the event in some senses overpower what import words could ever carry. Yet of course, Hagan’s own disavowal of metaphor using the example of an “elevator [coming down] at full speed” is actually not even metaphor, but rather a synecdoche; a troubling slippage which I will return to in the first chapter of this thesis.55 James Berger, too, takes up the idea that language seemed an inappropriate vehicle to represent the seemingly ineffable nature of the event. He writes, “[n]othing adequate, nothing corresponding in language could stand in for [9/11]. No metaphor could carry language across to it. There was nothing to call it because it had taken over reality entirely” (“There's No Backhand to This”, 54). Such a disavowal of literature, or at least literary deployments such as metaphor, demonstrates a deep critical equivocation as to the merits and capabilities of art, and specifically literature, to translate or mediate 9/11.
55 I am grateful to Elizabeth McMahon for drawing my attention to this slippage. 31
Indeed, and by definition, many 9/11 novelists managed to overcome anxiety about speech in order to write. Certainly the plethora of novels written on the subject of 9/11 demonstrates an emphasis on naming, or in the very least attempting to name, Mitchell’s “unnamable”. Speaking to the perceived crisis of representation, critic Michael Wood points out: to call something 'unspeakable' is quite different from remaining silent, and implies a peculiar disappointment, an assumption that words are supposed to make sense of everything, and have now let us down when we most needed them... But when did words ever make such extravagant, untenable promises? (para 1).
In many ways, the debate over speech after trauma is not concerned with whether one should remain silent, but rather about how one should take up the mantle of the speaker: many authors of 9/11 novels perform this very dilemma in order to have permission to speak.
The paradox of speech and silence is embedded in the novels themselves in ways both thematic and structural. In terms of theme, articulation is explicitly linked to redemption in certain texts, such as Joyce Maynard’s The Usual Rules (2003), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). Here, the protagonists undergo different transformations and come to a better understanding of their lives and priorities towards the ends of the novels. In this way, the burden of speech proves, in fact, to be transformative. Conversely, and countering such a notion of recovery, is Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) that posits that speaking after trauma is inherently damaging to the psyche, and instead contends that the event of 9/11 represented a significant national trauma and an iteration of past violence, this time on American shores. Spiegelman refers to the popular idiom of “waiting for the other shoe to drop” (1) in order to describe the environment post-9/11, claiming that 9/11 inaugurated a new, heightened state of terror and anxiety. Following the tensions concerning the ability of literature to mediate the event of 9/11, the novels demonstrate both that speech after trauma can be on the one hand a deeply redemptive experience, and on the other, that it can be a fracturing and troublesome practice.
The novels of 9/11 also “encircle” the paradox of speech and silence in their very structure. All ten novels examined in this thesis contain complex 32 demonstrations of disrupted and problematised linearity of narrative, whether demonstrated through analepses and prolepses, disjointed and fragmented sections or even the recurrent theme of wishing to freeze or stop time. In particular, Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006) is composed entirely of fragments of narrative which not only skip forwards and backwards in time, but very often end with an ellipsis, defying resolution. Such temporal complexity relates back to the two conflicting notions of compulsion and denial: it is as if the narrative itself imports the hesitation about speech in reality. Further, these contradictions and conflicts speak to the identity crises across the range of novels: various identity points such as human, U.S. citizen, Jewish-American, survivor and victim recur as this hesitation crosses over and implicates both the narratives and the real tensions of writing fiction on the subject of 9/11. Importantly, all of the texts examined in this thesis explore the paradox of speech and silence in some capacity: and more crucially, none ever come to a resolution: all move between the two contradictory ends of the dichotomy.
Universality and Specificity The second paradox of the literature of 9/11 investigated in this thesis takes up the hesitations concerning writing in the aftermath: it is the wish to universalise the event, yet to claim simultaneously its uniqueness. On the one hand, 9/11 was situated as an incommensurable and incomprehensible56 event that could never be equated with another tragedy. Cultural theorist John Frow notes of 9/11 that it “carries embedded within it the principles of a change in the course of history” (71). Indeed, the subsequent media attention also created a 9/11 mythology of sorts whereby the Western world was submerged in images, articles and news reports concerning the event for months afterwards, declaring the unprecedented nature of the attacks.57 But on the other hand, 9/11 became shorthand for a tragedy that could connect
56 See Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, “Representing 9/11: Literature and Resistance.” Literature after 9/11, Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 5-6. 57 See, for example, Nancy Gibbs, “If You Want to Humble an Empire.” Time 14 September 2001 and Rick Hampson, "A Month Later, 'Normal Is Relative'." USA Today 11 October 2001: 5A. 33 the event to other global catastrophes,58 both past and present. Architect Gustavo Bonevardi writes that part of the initial proposal for the “Tribute in Light” memorial was to include “in solidarity, similar light towers to be erected in cities around the world: London, Paris, Buenos Aires. The original towers were destroyed. Now virtual ones would sprout up all over the world” (para 5). Bonevardi’s wish for solidarity in the form of replica light-towers underlines the wish to universalise and replicate the memorial to other cities, as if the “virtual” Towers could, as global simulacra, stand in for and substitute their missing original.
The wish for replica Towers also reminds us of the domain of postmodernism, for the challenges to the authentic self are again made manifest. I argue such irreconcilability recurs in the novels of 9/11, too, which move constantly between these two desires of generality and specificity, and I chart the three main ways this occurs. First, the media response to the event worked to break down perceived borders between subject, viewer and victim. Second, various changes to the way in which victimhood is constructed changed the ways in which the victim was posited in the aftermath. Finally, the particularly American absorption by trauma predicated the overwhelming identificatory responses on the part of novelists, artists and individuals. These responses further blurred the lines between conceptualising the event of 9/11 as specific to New York City, and also as a global event.
The first aspect of this contradiction, the wish to universalise and make specific the event of 9/11, occurred due to several factors that elicited a prolific worldwide response. The intense and unparalleled media coverage that followed the visually unprecedented event of 9/11 seemed to break down the borders between victims, bystanders and viewers. In this way, many who watched the event occur could envisage themselves engaging in the tragedy; feeling and experiencing the event firsthand. In fact, the very performance of a 9/11 narrative actually constructs and invites identification and sympathy from an audience, insisting on the specificity of the event. Cementing its status as
58 See, for example, Mike Davis, “The Flames of New York.” New Left Review 12 (2001): 34- 50 and Ariel Dorfman, “America Looks at Itself through Humanity's Mirror.” Los Angeles Times September 21 2001: B15. 34 the “most documented event in history” (Hoskins, 302), the event of 9/11 captured the public imagination in ways that were reminiscent of the “visual documents” (Newton, 160) of another event steeped in the American consciousness: the Vietnam War. The collapse of the Twin Towers, like moments from the first televised war, Vietnam, was captured and simultaneously relayed (and later remediated) via the medium of television.59 As historian and filmmaker Christian Delage notes, “the space for viewing... allowed us to share, even from a distance, the sensations of the impact felt at the site” (165). Noting a similar effect and writing on the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, historian Edward Linenthal notes that the prolific media coverage of that terrorist event, also on U.S. soil, “made it possible for millions to imagine themselves part of a worldwide bereaved community, participating in the pathos of the event” (3). Importantly also, Ground Zero was unlike other memorial sites of international conflict, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. as it marks both the place of catastrophe and of remembrance, as opposed to the latter only.60 In the specifically American context of trauma then, the Twin Towers and the event of 9/11 came to symbolise a national construct of catastrophe, seen in homes and communities as a highly personal attack.
A second aspect of the universalising imperative of 9/11 was the contemporary and concurrent change that has developed in the attitude toward victimhood. Using the primary model of modern trauma, the Holocaust, Peter Novick suggests victimhood has become “a status... often eagerly embraced” (The Holocaust in American Life, 8). Here, Holocaust literature provides a ready template upon which authors of 9/11 fiction could project a new trauma following older and traditional cultural inscriptions of catastrophe. While there are crucial differences between these two events,61 there are
59 For an extensive discussion concerning the implications of televised images of war, see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Photographing the Vietnam War.” American Visual Cultures, Eds. David Holloway and John Beck, (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 199-208. 60 In this sense, parallels could be made between, for example, sites of significance from the American Civil War such as Gettysburg, PA and Ground Zero, in that the memorial stands in the same place as the historical event. 61 Noting that while there can be “no equating 9/11 and the Holocaust”, Holocaust survivor Dori Laub acknowledges there is a “resemblance” between the two events because 9/11 “was about something unfathomable, at the roots of which there may be evil for which no ways of 35 significant links between the literature of 9/11 and Holocaust fiction.62 For instance, through the mythology created around Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, New York City has long been framed as the new safe haven for immigrants, and in particular, for many Jewish people, who escaped the troubles of old Europe for an accepting place of tolerance and opportunity. Therefore the attack (perpetrated by Arab terrorists) had particular resonance for the Jewish community, and formed visible threads of meaning between the two discourses and genres.63 In the aftermath, victimhood, while sometimes “embraced” in Novick’s terms, could also be read as being “promiscuously” extended to “the general public... as if we were all casualties... rather than merely sat safely in our living rooms glued to our television sets” (Harris, 5). Here, the tensions between specificity and generality are complex: while victimhood can be a broad term under which a general audience could congregate, it also relates very specifically to those involved in the attacks. The line of delineation between these two camps is, at best, blurry, as those with particular histories, as discussed in terms of Jewish Americans, may feel certain resonances. Of course, any attempts to deny the specificity of the attacks seem to deny the real victims of the event. Such a contention is particularly pertinent concerning the production of literature in the aftermath, as at times authors identified with the status of victim which led to sensationalised and often over-sentimentalised aspects of the fiction which I will go on to detail. explaining or understanding yet exist”; Laub, “September 11, 2001 - an Event without a Voice.” Trauma at Home: After 9/11, Ed. Judith Greenberg, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 207, 214. 62 Any conceptualisation of literature after catastrophe such as 9/11 fiction necessarily recalls the central modern model of art after trauma, namely Holocaust literature, of which Adorno famously noted, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”; Adorno, Prisms, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 84. Adorno’s comments in some senses inaugurate the debates concerning representation after the historically specific event of the Holocaust. Adorno later revised his comment, and claimed, “[i]t could equally well be said that [after Auschwitz] one must write poems… [because] as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be art as the objective form of that awareness”; Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 110-111. Susan Gubar analyses Adorno’s two statements in context of writing after trauma; see Gubar, Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). For an analysis of Adorno and trauma literature, see also Dana Villa, “Genealogies of Total Domination: Arendt, Adorno, and Auschwitz.” New German Critique 34.1 (2007): 1-45. 63 Importantly, many of the writers of 9/11 fiction are Jewish-Americans, such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Art Spiegelman, the latter of whom overtly references familial involvement in the Holocaust when he writes in the preface to In the Shadow of No Towers, “my parents, Auschwitz survivors, had... taught me to always keep my bags packed”; Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, (New York: Pantheon, 2004), i. 36
Consequently, I examine an issue of specificity within the universal and argue that there is a particularly American absorption by tragedy and trauma, which goes some way to explain the broad identification and participation with 9/11 on the part of those who did not experience the event firsthand. Given this absorption, it is inevitable that the event of 9/11 would elicit a public response of such magnitude and extent; essentially making the event a universal one. In his book, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture, Mark Seltzer conceptualises this specifically American cultural preoccupation with trauma as a “wound culture” made up of a “public fascination with torn and open bodies and... a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (1). This type of compulsive obsession with trauma occurs with “[t]he convening of the public around scenes of violence – the rushing to the scene of the accident, the milling around the point of impact” (1). In a corresponding manner, Linenthal notes of the Oklahoma City bombing that there was a “desire to ‘bump up’ against those worlds by touching – from a safe distance – the traumatic experiences of those immersed in the world of the bombing” (3). This wish to “bump up” against the event relates back to the desire to universalise the tragedy of 9/11: to draw near to the tragedy regardless of one’s relationship to it, and leads me to analyse the contradictory impulse to maintain its specificity.
In contrast to the universalising aspects of 9/11, there is also an insistent wish to maintain the event as an anomaly: as an occurrence particular only to those who experienced it firsthand, or who lived in New York City at the time. Dori Laub, Holocaust survivor and trauma theorist, upholds the specificity argument, suggesting that while there is a “resemblance” (“September 11, 2001 - an Event without a Voice”, 207) between the event of 9/11 and the Holocaust, there can be “no equating” the two, because the “scale is too disproportionate” (207). The idea that 9/11 is unique in this way is exemplified in the novels of 9/11, too, with a narrative preoccupation emphasising the fact that this event could only be compared to itself: that its singularity was in fact its most defining feature.
37
The novels of 9/11 engage with the universal and specific paradox in wide- ranging ways, again constantly shifting between different modes and perspectives. First, various novels utilise the concept of universalisation in order to make the event of 9/11 appear as a less frightening anomaly, and instead, as a reiteration of historical violence. I argue that novels such as Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (2005) and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days (2005) seek to work against New York City’s anti-historical self-conception. These novels are both structured as trilogies, each section of which is located in a different moment in New York City’s history. McGrath and Cunningham both overtly reference past iterations of catastrophe, each covering events such as devastating fires, the plague and the fight against the British in order to position the event of 9/11 as a ‘mere’ repetition of previous trauma.
In a related type of iterative violence, other novels of 9/11 dislocate the event of 9/11 onto another time or place in order for their protagonist to come to terms with its occurrence. For instance in Pattern Recognition (2003), it is the protagonist Cayce who finally grieves the event of 9/11 not in New York City, but almost a year later when excavating the remains of a World War II plane and the skeleton of its pilot in Russia. These narrative devices suggest attempts on the part of the novels to re-inscribe 9/11 as a broader historical pattern: one in which 9/11 is a repetition of violence as opposed to a calamitous irregularity. In In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), the fictionalised protagonist of Art Spiegelman comments both on the event itself and its aftermath, making connections between New York City and other catastrophes. He says of the smell at Ground Zero, “I remember my father trying to describe what the smoke in Auschwitz smelled like. The closest he got was telling me it was... ‘indescribable’. That’s exactly what the air in Lower Manhattan smelled like after Sept. 11!” (3). Here, the narrator makes an explicit comparison with World War II, as if to equate or conflate the two events. Further, he says of the proliferation of American flags in the aftermath, “why did those provincial American flags have to sprout out of the embers of Ground Zero? Why not... a globe??!” (7). In a most overt universalisation of the event, Spiegelman wishes that 9/11 was conceptualised not as an attack 38 on one city of the United States, but in fact as an assault on the world itself: on global values and civilians.
Conversely, other novels decry the universalisation of the event, and claim its specificity, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), where the protagonist Oskar is invested with specific, almost metafictional apprehensiveness concerning the urge to reinscribe the event of 9/11 within fiction. Oskar says of his version of the event, “[i]t makes me incredibly angry that people all over the world can know things that I can’t, because it happened here, and it happened to me, so shouldn’t it be mine?” (256). Here, Oskar’s anxiety is not only about writing – an anxiety which links back to the speech and silence paradox – but it is very particularly concerned with the specific nature of the 9/11 attacks: “shouldn’t it be mine?”. Here, the intense desire to keep the event personalised and particular to those who experienced it is made clear, which links back to the notion of an extended victimhood in relation to 9/11. However, the paradoxical concern of specific and universalised trauma cannot be reduced to simple and clearly delineated manifestations. While at times some novels seek only to claim one side of the dilemma, at different times, they all slide between its two extremes. Returning to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for instance, I argue that the overt references, for example, to Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1961), another novel set in a post-trauma landscape, paradoxically concede the universality of tragedy. The very act of infusing the text with overt, specific insistence, “shouldn’t it be mine?” as well as including explicit references to universal traumas past like WWII, underlines the very complexity of this paradox, and its deployment within fiction. In fact, these extremes sometimes work mutually to constitute and reinforce each other, as I will go on to detail in the chapters of this thesis.
Absence and Presence The final paradox of 9/11 literature investigated in this thesis is the fear of absence but the affront of presence, which draws on both the difficulties of speech and the problematics of universalising the tragedy. I frame my discussion drawing on 9/11 theorists Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee 39
Quinn, who note that “9/11 literature works as a prosthesis, an awkward substitute for and attempt to compensate for the unrepresentable absence effected by 9/11 itself.” (2) This absence of the Twin Towers was for many a perceptual rupture: literature theorist Frank Lentricchia and theatre studies theorist Jody McAuliffe call it a “hole in the familiar” (350) and the critic Hal Foster notes that in the aftermath of 9/11, “[s]ome of us mourn a thing we didn't know we loved” (“11 September - Roundtable Discussion”). Further, the immense loss of lives figures importantly in conceiving this paradox: the troubling absence of bodies at the site of Ground Zero pervades much of the fiction in ways I will trace in the first chapter of this thesis. Indeed, the paradox of absence and presence also focuses on the loss of the Twin Towers, and the novels oscillate between commemorating their absence and expressing the wish for their return. Given these tensions, one of the first manifestations of this paradox is the desire to create explanatory narratives for 9/11 in order to recreate a form of presence from absence: to make something out of nothing. Second, the range of novels returns to various operations with which to revive the lost objects and bodies of 9/11 within the fiction as a response to the real losses of the event: to offer substitute bodies and objects for the losses sustained.
I argue that creating a narrative after catastrophe becomes a means of giving meaning and explanation to the event: giving presence when there is only absence. Post-9/11 novels, almost by definition, overcome the unspeakability thesis and seek to undo the trauma of the event and offer explanatory narratives for its occurrence. In this way, the novels of 9/11 can provide a sense of mastery over fear and absence: the very construction of a narrative can be read as an act of replacement. Keniston and Follansbee Quinn suggest that the literary works of 9/11 “employ... representational strategies that emphasize the desire for (and construction of) meaning” (2) and such interpretive reconstructions necessarily contain an individual recollection of the event, fictionalised and contextualised to varying extents. Having regard to these problematics of representation, Leigh Gilmore suggests, “[c]rucial to the experience of trauma are the difficulties that arise in trying to articulate it… Thus language bears a heavy burden in the theorization of trauma [as it] 40 marks a site where expectations amass” (143). Questions concerning whether the event was itself perceived as traumatic in reality are secondary to my analysis: I will focus instead on the practices within the fiction that subscribe to and reinforce the rhetoric of trauma while addressing the “heavy burden” of which Gilmore writes.
In light of the complications concerning the theorisation of trauma in reality,64 the novels of 9/11 can be constructed as a domain in which the catastrophe of 9/11 can be reformed, reframed and sometimes even undone. Importantly, the quests for meaning which are undertaken in the novels are often foiled: many narrators and protagonists never find a satisfying reason for their loss, but in different ways, come to accept its occurrence. As E. Ann Kaplan notes, “art can function as a way of “translating” trauma – that is, of finding ways to make meaning out of, and to communicate, catastrophes that happen to others as well as to oneself” (Trauma Culture, 19). The practice of such a translation, in Kaplan’s terms, has often been criticised,65 yet many of the novels written about 9/11 seem to suggest a preoccupation with its explanation. This is not to say that the novels necessarily theorise the political motivations or outcomes of the event, but that they attempt to personalise a collective memory, and to offer narrative in the face of the overwhelming absences inaugurated by the event.
The wish for presence is manifested across the novels of 9/11 in a range of operations, working to deny the absence caused by the event. A first clear demonstration of the wish for presence comes from the theme of reversing
64 See, for example, Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Susannah Radstone, “The War of the Fathers: Trauma, Fantasy and September 11.” Signs 28.1 (2002): 457-460; Jean Laplanche. New Foundations of Psychoanalysis, Trans. David Macey, (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Dominick LaCapra, “Reflections on Trauma, Absence, and Loss.” Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Eds. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 178-204, and Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 65 Almost three years after the attacks, Michiko Kakutani wrote, “[a]ll too often creative efforts [to portray 9/11] have tried to impose a conventional narrative [and] closure vis-à-vis 9/11 remains elusive, and the artistic efforts, which enshrine that closure, tend to feel hollow and forced”; Kakutani, “Portraying 9/11 as a Katzenjammer Catastrophe.” New York Times Book Review 31 August 2004, E.6. See also B. R. Myers, “A Bag of Tired Tricks: Blank Pages? Photos of Mating Tortoises? The Death Throes of the Postmodern Novel.” The Atlantic Monthly 295.4 (2005): 115-121. 41 time, which is particularly evident within Maynard’s The Usual Rules and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Here, in a straightforward wish for the return of the Towers – and for their respective lost parents – both child protagonists yearn to turn back time, such that the event of 9/11 could have never occurred. This temporal dislocation is also tied up with the difficulties (the opposing desires of hesitation and compulsion) related to speech after trauma.
The novels of 9/11 also exhibit a wish for the presence of the lost bodies in particular, and consequently various texts maintain thematic preoccupations with replication and substitution. For instance Pattern Recognition is replete with globalised simulacra and identical-looking cities that mirror each other. Conversely, in Specimen Days, there is a recurring concern about re- animating the dead body by consuming it into one’s own body. One of the most ambivalent narrative explorations of absence and presence is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Here, the protagonist Oskar performs the character of Yorrick’s skull in a school production of Hamlet – a play that contains a most famous ghost figure – the very essence of simultaneous absence and presence. In the novel, the traumatised child character who has lost his father in the 9/11 attacks must embody the dead skull – not even the whole body – in a macabre performance steeped in resonances of death, ghosts and uncertainty.
An acceptance of absence also occurs in the novels The Writing on the Wall, The Good Life and Patten Recognition, where the trope of the twin is utilised to symbolise the Twin Towers themselves. Crucially in these novels respectively, each set of twins is somehow separated: by death, by divorce and by a bomb explosion, rendering one twin mute. The separation of twins seems to focus on the untenability of the double post-9/11, and suggests that pairings within the narrative are doomed given that the largest twins of the city were toppled. This narrative preoccupation demonstrates an ambivalence towards absence, also; in no novel of 9/11 fiction do both twins die. This ambivalence highlights again the intricacy of these paradoxes, and gestures towards the myriad forms of its contradictory and diverse narrativisation in the 42 novels. The three chapters of my thesis trace the various types of substitution at narrative and figurative levels in the novels of 9/11. Indeed, in so mapping the paradoxical and contradictory processes of this substitution, I reveal the complex relationship between literature and the event of 9/11.
By charting the patterns that emerge in translating the real into the rhetorical, I map the different ways in which the event of 9/11 has been reconstructed and narrativised and map the thematic and figurative practices employed in order to do so. As W.J.T. Mitchell notes in his essay “911: Criticism and Crisis”: [t]he critical voices that seem to matter most at this moment are those that seem prepared to acknowledge that this event [9/11] might exceed our categories of critical judgment and require some new ways of thinking (571).
The ability of novels of 9/11 to “exceed our categories of judgment” relates to my identification of the paradoxes of 9/11. I argue that the novels of 9/11 are all preoccupied with substitution, and that this practice occurs at the level of narrative, figuration and character. Accordingly, and in order to offer a sustained analysis of substitution, my conceptual framework utilises the domains of psychoanalysis, critical theory and cultural studies in order to provide an account of the novels of 9/11. These approaches allow for a psychoanalytic and literary commentary concerning a range of 9/11 narratives. As such, I offer an analysis of various iterations of different versions of the event within the novels across the areas of the body, the city and time as mutually coextensive and supportive domains, which will constitute the three chapters of this thesis.
Chapter Overview
Chapter One Substitute Bodies: Corporeality in the Novels of 9/11 The main claim of this chapter is that the novels of 9/11 seek to re-embody the lost bodies of the event by variously proposing substitutes; using the corporeal to mediate the broader absences of 9/11. In this way, fictional bodies also symbolise the greater losses sustained in the event. The lost body of 9/11 poses a peculiar challenge to the representation of materiality posited by 43 postmodern, and in particular, feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway66 and Judith Butler.67 I argue that the specific lost body of 9/11 of the novels works to authorises speech, but that in so doing, underlines the futility of its retrieval. Bonevardi writes of the “Tribute in Light” memorial that “[o]ur temporary monument had to address the void in the New York skyline and symbolize the spirits of the thousands caught in the towers’ tragic collapse” (para 6, emphasis added). In fact, the troubling slippages between memorialising the lost buildings and the lost bodies recur across the novels. In light of this slippage, the novels both play out the theme of substitution within their pages and also seek to act – as physical books and cultural artefacts – as material substitutes for the losses of the real event. Here, the novels of 9/11 represent both the text (the idea in language) and the work (the actual material book).68 Here, my analysis necessarily brings together the idea of the body as a text with the idea of a text as body: the novels themselves as cultural artefacts stand in for the lost bodies of 9/11. Such a negotiation involving the real and the rhetorical necessarily and inherently involves paradoxes, such as the tension between speaking after trauma and remaining silent, and that of absence and presence in particular. I will use a triangulated theoretical model, and argue that it is the body itself which is used to authorise speech in 9/11 novels, and as such, holds the diacritical position of being the focus of the narrative both thematically and in terms of textual operations employed.
I also draw on the Freudian theory of fort/da to analyse the body in terms of its curious and simultaneous narrative absence and presence. I overlay this analysis with Jean Baudrillard’s conceptualisation of the simulacrum, and analyse the particular ways in which the body is substituted, replicated and
66 Haraway’s so-called “boundary creature”, the cyborg, provided a new, hybrid body of “machine and organism”, designed as a metaphor for the “disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self”; Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Ed. Donna Haraway, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149- 181. 67 Butler’s well-known ideas of the body in narrative foreground my analysis of the lost body of 9/11. See Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions.” The Journal of Philosophy 86.11 (1989): 601-607. 68 Roland Barthes differentiates the terms by explaining “the Work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), [and] the Text is a methodological field... the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language”, Barthes, “From Work to Text.” Image, Music, Text. Ed. Stephen Heath, (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 156-157. 44 repeated in the novels. The last tier of the model focuses on narratologist Peter Brooks’ conception of narrative bodies, and suggests that it is the body through which the narrative is authorised. These three points of the model offer a frame through which we can study the range of paradoxical iterations of the body within 9/11 novels.
The first part of my argument will offer an analysis of substitution at a metonymic level, paying particular attention to the paradoxical and often mutually exclusive readings of these textual bodies. First I will argue that the very vehicle of metonymy is a respectful way of negotiating the problematics of speaking after trauma, alleviating some of the anxieties concerning speech after trauma. While metaphor makes a direct substitution of one idea or symbol with another, metonymy offers a reading whereby the symbolic and the real can exist simultaneously. In this way, metaphor is seen effectively to obscure and in some senses desecrate the 9/11 body with the attempt to replace it, even textually. Conversely the operation of metonymy is an appropriate lens through which to view the novels of 9/11, as it allows for a simultaneous perception of the two, crucial domains. In light of this distinction, I draw first on a study of the highly mediated newspaper series entitled “Portraits of Grief” and analyse the ways in which the novels have fictionalised this series, seeking both to re-embody the individuals lost in 9/11, and further to come to terms with their enduring absence through metonymic representation. This nuanced form of substitution leads me to analyse the dominant trope of the twin, where one twin can act as a substitute for the other. In each demonstration of twins across the 9/11 novels, whether biological twins or siblings or married couples, one twin always becomes separated or lost, symbolising the untenability of the double in the aftermath of 9/11. In fact, the vehicle of the twins is always used in narrative as a means of representing a pure pre-9/11 era. However, even the fictional hope that this could be the case fails in the novels, as each pairing of twins suffers some loss, in the form of death, separation or trauma.
The second part of my argument will examine substitution at the level of the narrative body, and argue that the diverse range of 9/11 novels all focus on 45 the wish to substitute the lost body through four main textual and thematic fixations, but paradoxically reveal the impossibility of so doing. First, characters substitute other objects or indeed themselves for other lost bodies in the novels. In the teen fiction novel The Usual Rules by Joyce Maynard and Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, both protagonists seek both to find substitutes for their respective parent’s death in 9/11, and ultimately attempt to offer themselves as a replacement body. Taking such a desire further, the second form of substitution is the desire to inhale the dead body of 9/11, as if by consuming the ashes, the characters could re-animate the lost body within their own skin. In The Zero and Falling Man, both protagonists inhale the dust and debris from the event, oscillating between desiring to incorporate the lost bodies and being disgusted by the concept.
The thesis will investigate how such disgust leads to the various forms of hysterical substitution within the novels, where characters, such as in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers, hysterically project themselves as the lost body of the event. Finally, the trope of historical substitution occurs whereby characters such as in Jay McInerney’s novel The Good Life attempt to substitute the lack of bodies of 9/11 with graveyards and cemeteries of other places and times in history, as if signalling a replacement or proxy lost body, yet simultaneously belying the impossibility of recovering the 9/11 body. These four types of substitution cross the novels of 9/11, and reveal the various and consistently paradoxical wishes to reanimate the lost body of 9/11, and to commemorate its passing.
In each of these sections, I shall offer readings of the body from different theoretical perspectives, proving that bodies are the direct way in which authors authorise themselves to speak after trauma. Further, I will demonstrate that while the body is intimately echoed and reflected within the narratives, it also performs crucial narrative functions as a device itself: the very narratives of 9/11 novels become an oeuvre or body of work which seeks to stand in for the real losses of the event.
46
Chapter Two Urban Space, Narrative and 9/11 The perceived conflation or slippage between the Twin Towers and the lives lost in the Twin Towers brings us to the domain of the city in this second chapter. My primary claim is that the real spatial ruptures brought about by the events of 9/11 have affected the ways in which urban spaces are conceptualised in the literature of 9/11, both in terms of structure and figuration. New York City itself is composed of paradoxical and contradictory elements, and around these I will map the various and often antithetical patterns of spatiality in the novels of 9/11 through the lens of four primary substitute cities and their respective relationships to space. Through this mapping, I will combine an understanding of the psychic, urban spaces of 9/11 with the literal city of New York. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s notion of a “modern social imaginary” and layering this concept with Maria Tumarkin’s conception of a “traumascape”, I argue that a range of different reconstructed cities and their spatial relations constitute diverse and paradoxical versions of the event of 9/11 and the city in the novels.
My argument begins by examining the fictional historical cities and their diverse manifestations across the novels. I propose that the novels of 9/11 such as the historical trilogies of Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days reconstruct both historical and present day iterations of trauma within the space of New York City, creating connections across time with other points of urban tragedy. At times such an operation works to demonstrate a disavowal of 9/11; at others a reflexive continuity between the present urban rupture and other sites of tragedy past. In this way, complex versions of substitute cities are recreated in the novels, both in terms of substitute present day and historical cities of New York. From here I analyse the psychic implications of space, and contend that the fragmented individual, such as in Don DeLillo’s dramatic Falling Man and Jess Walter’s darkly comic The Zero comes to represent the disjointed aftermath, and embodies the structural and urban damage of the event. Further, and paradoxically, the fractured individual can also demonstrate the desire to reintegrate and form a whole once more: to 47 become a replacement body for the real lost bodies of the event of 9/11. Thirdly, I will argue that the reconstructed pre-9/11 city, such as New York City in Jonathan Safran Foer’s postmodern Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close or London and Tokyo in William Gibson’s hyperrealist Pattern Recognition, where characters seek on the one hand to journey the city in an attempt to discover more about the event of 9/11 and the loses sustained. On the other, characters also seek to memorialise the city in order to come to terms with the event of 9/11. These versions of the city allow characters to move between the paradox of absence and presence, viewing the city as a space of acceptance of loss or as a place of betrayal.
Finally, I will examine the psychic desire to rebuild, and contend that various characters across the range of novels desire the return of the Twin Towers and of a pre-9/11 New York City, while others wish for their destruction. In this way, the novels fantasise about a replacement city, complete with Twin Towers and no accident, but must accept ultimately the substitute of the post- 9/11 city. These four iterations of reconstructed cities demonstrate the various oscillations in the novels concerning the paradox of absence and presence, and further invoke complications concerning claiming the specificity of the event, but desiring its universal reach. The reconstructions of New York City within the novels of 9/11 exemplify some of the primary difficulties of writing after trauma: how can we represent that which is no longer there? Further, the structural and figurative literary responses underscore the paradoxical nature of such a negotiation.
Chapter Three “Time is Out of Joint”: Temporality in the Novels of 9/11 Having realised the manifold and overwhelming absences proliferated at the level of the city, the novels move to the domain of time to undo the problems of the material losses and to thwart the attacks in fiction. The central argument in the third chapter is that the event of 9/11 prompts temporal disjunctions within the novels, which are complicated and often paradoxical. As such, my argument employs a largely psychoanalytic framework in order to examine fully the relationships between the event of 9/11 and time, and the ensuing 48 range of narrative temporal strategies deployed within the fiction. My discussion begins with an exploration of the imaginary disaster history of New York City and examines the hysteron/proteron operation within the novels, which draws upon the past fantasies of destruction projected onto New York City and suggests a desire to rehearse – and reverse – the event of 9/11. Here I analyse the novels of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Falling Man and argue that the novels seek to turn back time and reimagine a new, pre- 9/11 city. I move from such re-imaginings to an analysis of the broad range and pattern of temporal complications which are made manifest in the fiction, such as the disrupted linearity, the stopping of time and the undoing of time, which seek to prefigure, represent and commemorate the event within fictional narratives. In light of this focus on narrative, I discuss the prolific use of analepses and prolepses within the novels, as well as the recurrent trope of the ghost figure. Finally, I map the tendency on the part of the fiction and critical writing on 9/11 to conflate the event with other tragedies, and argue that this temporal transposition is an attempt, at different times, both to accept and deny the occurrence of 9/11. Such paradoxical oscillations and attempts to manipulate time speak to the wish to reverse the absence characterising the post-9/11 and return to a more innocent pre-9/11 world.
In the aftermath of 9/11, art had a significant and integral role to play in the mediation and commemoration of the event. Moving across the domains of the real and the fictive, I seek to understand the manifestations of the event in the texts, and map these in their various spatial, corporeal and temporal domains. Literature that features the event of 9/11 draws together the domains of the real and the rhetorical and reconstructs myriad, imaginary versions and revisions of the event, creating complex substitutes throughout. This thesis will examine the body of work I name the ‘literature of 9/11’, and identify the ways in which these novels represent and re-imagine the memory of 9/11, creating substitute and paradoxical narratives and bodies. Despite the fact that innumerable acts of destruction in the past hundred years have overshadowed the extent and catastrophe of 9/11, the attention it has received owes more to the imaginative power and gruesome spectacle of an act of violence taking place within the one of the word’s most modern cities. With this invitation to 49 open up the discourses surrounding the event of 9/11, I will begin with an investigation of the complex ways in which the paradoxes of 9/11 have been played out and reinscribed within the novels. 50
Chapter One
Substitute Bodies: Corporeality in the Novels of 9/11
“[t]he loss is so great that the only way to bring it to language is to think small, cutting it down to size. You accede to the big through the little: the “telling detail” testifies to the big whole, the hole left by the disappearance of the loved one within the global identity of victim” – Nancy K. Miller, ““Portraits of Grief”: Telling Details and the Testimony of Trauma.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.3 (2003): 122- 123.
In this chapter, I present a study of corporeality and its meaning within the fiction of 9/11 and reveal how the novels encircle the lost body and are preoccupied by its absence. In fact, the lost body authorises speech in narrative and it is the nature and complexity of this authorisation through modes of substitution and paradox that will be the focus of this chapter. Crucially, while on the one hand the body can enable and authorise speech within the novels, on the other it underscores the very failure of speech: the fiction contains a knowing and necessary futility concerning the corporeal.69 In
69 The recurrent focus on lost bodies and their retrieval in the novels of 9/11 is suggestive of Bill Brown’s notion that “material objects seem [to be] a condition of narratability”; Brown, “The 51 making these claims, I begin with the understanding that the body is a deeply volatile and charged theoretical term, given its various and diverse critical iterations. These range from Foucault and Butler’s ideas of cultural inscription,70 to Kristeva’s somatic, visceral and psychic body71 to Donna Haraway’s cyborg, hybrid body,72 and all of these theories inform my reading of how the bodies within 9/11 novels are constructed. Indeed, in the two largely postmodern decades preceding the event of 9/11, the body was an especially contested site in theory – especially feminist theory which re- instated corporeality – with a particular focus on the nature and position of the body in a text.
In this domain of postmodernism that celebrated the virtual, non-material body, the status of the corporeal was prosthetic, artificial and haptic: its actual location of apparent insignificance. In fact, we can turn to two 9/11 novelists, William Gibson and Art Spiegelman, who stood at the interstices of postmodernism and corporeal transience and compare the ways in which their post-9/11 fictional bodies depart from their oeuvre. Gibson’s canonical novel Neuromancer (1984) explores virtual representations of corporeality, and graphic novelist Spiegelman’s Maus (1986) de-centres the human body by replacing it with bodies of animals. In texts such as these, the body is highly protean, morphing between machine, animal and human at different points in the texts. However, the event of 9/11 posited a peculiar challenge to these writers: how do you represent an event, situated in the centre of postmodernity – New York City – that had no bodies? I argue that this challenge prompted 9/11 novelists to centre on the lost body in their novels, seeking to re-animate or re-imagine its presence. In this way, 9/11 returns us to the primacy of the
Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism).” Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999): 12. Further and related to modes of authorising speech, Sarah Savitt interrogates the way that some autobiographies permit articulation through the wounded body of their author; Savitt, “‘Every Writer Needs a Wound’: Suffering and the Suffering Body in Contemporary Literary Autobiography.” The Cambridge Quarterly 31.4 (2002): 327-344. 70 See, for example, Judith Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions.” The Journal of Philosophy 86.11 (1989): 601-607 and Butler, “Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear.” Social Text 20.3 (2002): 177-188. 71 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 72 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), 149-181. 52 body: for Gibson, he moved from writing science fiction to realist prose in Pattern Recognition (2003), and Spiegelman moved from solely drawing humans as animals to drawing humans primarily in In the Shadow of No Towers (2004).73 These moves gesture towards the various ways in which 9/11 disorients and unanchors fiction, because of the inability to locate the lost bodies of 9/11. Instead, novelists must negotiate the dilemma of corporeal humanity at the centre of the de-personified discourse of postmodernism.
It is in the context of this negotiation that the fiction of 9/11 sets up a new relation to the body, and complicates ideas of representation and authority. This is not to say that 9/11 has contradicted or directly opposed postmodernist representation wholesale, but rather that the event poses particular dilemmas about the body and refocuses postmodern questions concerning its narrativisation. I use the term, “the lost body of 9/11”, (with full awareness of the complications such material insistent presupposes) to refer specifically to the myriad physical, material bodies which could not be recovered in the aftermath of 9/11, for it is these bodies that are the primary focus across the range of 9/11 novels. In fact, the body is treated much like an object to be regained in the novels, as distinct from a person or character: corporeality is paramount and the narratives of 9/11 insist upon its primacy at every turn. In light of these issues of corporeality, my study necessarily negotiates the conventional, narratological relationship between a body of literature and the body as a text, and such a relationship connects the overdetermination of bodies at the level of narrative and reality. Given these complex iterations of the body in the novels and in the event, I will analyse the multiple interrelations between narrative and the bodies peculiar to 9/11. In particular, I will demonstrate that 9/11 demands a re-assessment of the corporeal dilemmas that recur in the novels, and render complex the body and its narrativisation at the level of structure, speech and figuration.
73 Crucially, Spiegelman reverts to drawing humans as animals in In the Shadow of No Towers in two primary instances. On the second broadsheet, Spiegelman inserts a small inset comic into the larger broadsheet with four frames of himself, writing, entitled “Notes of a Heartbroken Narcissist”. The fourth and final frame portrays himself as an anthropomorphised mouse, with the caption, “[i]ssues of self-representation have left me slackjawed!” (2). Similarly, Spiegelman-as-mouse reappears on the next broadsheet describing the air in lower Manhattan after the attacks as resembling the air in Auschwitz; a self-referential mode of measuring the trauma. 53
This chapter’s foundational contention is that in light of the challenge to postmodernity and the corporeal, the novels of 9/11 seek to re-embody the lost bodies of the event by variously proposing substitutes; using the corporeal to mediate the broader absences of 9/11. My analysis will reveal that the different versions of aestheticised and reconstructed corporeality within the novels vacillate between wishing for the return of the lost body and seeking to commemorate its absence. By mapping the patterns of these impulses, and claiming that the fiction moves between the two in relation to its treatment of the fictional body, I will examine the central, paradoxical iterations of the body within narrative. Indeed, recalling this paradox of absence and presence, I argue that the fictional body can be read as a literary artefact that seeks to stand in for the lost bodies of the event. As a narrative tool, then, the body can stand as an entry point to the event; a lens through which we can ‘read’ 9/11.
The peculiar 9/11 body, despite its often-horrifying rupture, has become the conduit through which to personalise and make specific the event in the novels of 9/11. Patricia Yaeger’s conceptualisation of the lost materiality of 9/11 substantiates such a reading. In “Rubble as Archive, or 9/11 as Dust, Debris, and Bodily Vanishing”, she writes: [i]f the residue of the World Trade Center has been variously narrated as the sacred, as nausea, as the uncanny, as corporeality, as a remnant of the lost work of production, then each speck of debris also suggests this narrative function: each part-object or crumpled portfolio offers an archive for exploring an era already vanished, opens a frightening portal into the past (192).
Yaeger’s insight can be read as an acknowledgement of the paradoxical nature of the narrative function after 9/11, as she moves between the specific “speck” to the more general “archive”. In fact, the notion that “each speck of debris” has the potential to narrate the event through the “archive” of trauma demonstrates the need to examine how the body is couched in 9/11 narratives. Further, these “part-objects” can, and indeed sometimes must, stand in for the whole, signifying a larger devastation.74 In this way, the body
74 Jennifer Wallace notes that the obvious primacy of the body in explaining tragedy dates back centuries, citing the tendency of ancient Greek plays to use an “eccyclema – or contraption for displaying the dead body” in order to represent disaster; Wallace, “‘We Can't Make More Dirt...’: Tragedy and the Excavated Body.” The Cambridge Quarterly 32.2 (2003), 104. 54 can offer a mode through which to make specific a horrific and sprawling event: it can narrate despite (and sometimes because of) its fragmented status in the 9/11 novels.
In order to conceptualise a framework to analyse the bodies of 9/11 fiction, I will deploy a triangulated model that offers a range of theoretical perspectives through which to read the novels. The first of these brings into view the relationship between absence, the lost body and substitution, and through a psychoanalytic lens suggests that the fictional body (or its lack thereof) is used as a vehicle through which to attempt to control trauma. Here I draw on Freud’s fort/da account, in which he suggests that traumatic departures or losses can be enacted and re-enacted in order to habituate oneself to their effects. Freud‘s well-known theory drew its inspiration from observing a small child playing with a spool of string. Throwing the spool away, the child would cry, ‘fort’ (gone), and then, pulling it back into sight, would exclaim, ‘da’ (here). Freud theorised that this game taught the child that departure was the necessary component of return, and that playing this out with his toy, the child could cope with real losses, such as bidding farewell to his mother, knowing that she would later return (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 18).75
The fort/da lens enables us to read the 9/11 novels as miming or enacting losses from the event and then creating fictional replacements or substitutes for these losses. In other words, using a range of plot devices and narrative reasons, the novels construct replacement, proxy bodies for the lost bodies of 9/11. The real traumatic departure within the fort/da principle, then, can be made acceptable by attempting to foreground a safe, if only fictional, return of the lost body. As architectural theorist Neil Leach notes of the fort/da idea, a “repetition of certain visual traumas can amount to a kind of overcoming of those traumas” (182, emphasis added). Further, given that the real victims of 9/11 cannot be brought back in literal terms, the ways in which the novels reenact the lost bodies of 9/11 and then create substitutes for these lost bodies can be read as an attempt to mediate and manage the real losses of
75 Art critic Hal Foster offers a constructive reading of Freud’s fort/da game, and explains the compulsion to compensate for loss. See Foster, Compulsive Beauty, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1993), 7-10. 55 the event. Given the overtly visual nature of the 9/11 attacks, the fort/da frame offers a crucial perspective that allows us to theorise the various substitute bodies proposed across the range of novels.
The second component of my theoretical model illuminates the practice of substitution and repetition in terms of the specific 9/11 context. I overlay my reading of Freud with theorist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum, and argue that substitution is embedded in the very event of 9/11 itself, and is a primary mode of engagement with the body in the novels of 9/11. In his influential work Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard notes that the simulacrum is the result of “substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (Simulacra and Simulation, 168) and in 9/11 narratives the substitute appears to offer a path away from absence to presence. In fact, the doubling of the Twin Towers, which were so essential to 9/11, offers the novels a mode of figuration and narration through which to simulate modes of compensation and replacement. Marianne Hirsch writes of the various substitutions in the aftermath of 9/11: although the towers have physically disappeared, they are actually still present all over the city: framed black and white photographs, postcards, t-shirts, and key chains featuring the towers are available on every street corner. In drawings, poems, and reconstructions, people are evoking presence where there is only absence (B13).
This same fantasy of replacing a loss with another object or person is a trope that recurs across the novels, speaking on the one hand to the desire to reanimate the real losses of the event. On the other, substitution is critiqued in the novels, as an impossible and futile gesture that only serves to highlight the primary absence.
The final part of my model brings together narrative structure and the lost bodies of 9/11. I draw on narrative theory which directs us to analyse, as Peter Brooks writes, “the relation of the body to narrative: how bodies come to be inscribed in narratives and narratives inscribed on the body” (1). I take up this chiastic perspective, which allows for a mutually constitutive relationship between the manner in which the real event of 9/11 affected materiality and 56 the ways in which bodies are represented and utilised within narrative.76 Through this lens, I will demonstrate that the bodies of 9/11 maintain a predominantly metonymic relation across the novels. The argument will show that the body, or a fragment of it, acts as a substitute and reference point for a larger whole. Indeed, as this discussion will reveal, in the game of enacting departure, following Freud’s fort/da model, the very narrative itself can stand in as a proxy for the lost bodies of the event.
This triangulated model allows the oscillations within the novels in respect of the body, and importantly, different parts will be in focus at different times. In this way, the model opens up the novels and enables us to identify and analyse the elaborate movements between the three perspectives. Indeed, given that the novels shift between the oppositional ideas of absence and presence, of dead and alive and of part and whole, this model permits the mapping of various iterations of the body that oscillate, transform and mutate within the fiction.
In light of these highly overdetermined bodies, the particular novels to which I refer in this chapter show the presence of substitutes at the levels of narrative and figuration, and provide us with links between corporeality, the event and narrative. These novels suggest various anxieties about representing the 9/11 body, such as the authorial discomfort with mourning and describing the dead body itself. I identify two primary categories of novels that represent various modes of substitution at the level of the body and in figuration. Across these novels, which are comprised of various genres, registers and temporalities, I map the myriad and conflicting pulls between the poles of presence and absence. These inclinations are illustrated through diverse ideas such as the recurring motif of the lost parent, separated couple and the wide-ranging use of the trope of the twin: all sets of doubles which become ruptured due to the
76 William Coté and Roger Simpson note of the utilisation of the body in narrative, “every story needs a “who,” a person who will humanize the event. And stories about violence and victims of crime and disaster are no different”; Coté and Simpson, Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting About Victims and Trauma, (New York: Colombia University Press, 2006), 85. I note here also that my approach draws on narrative theorist Daniel Punday, who writes extensively on the links between bodies and narrative, claiming that “often the value of the body to our ways of telling stories and talking about reading is precisely its “otherness” - its ability to stand in for what ought to be outside of representation”; Punday, Narrative Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Narratology, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), viii-ix. 57 loss of one half of the pair. The surviving twin, partner or child must then negotiate the loss of this body in the novel, coming to terms with its absence, but wishing for its presence.
Given these conflicting impulses, the first category of novels features and interrogates the dead body of 9/11, and includes Jay McInerney’s social satire The Good Life, Don DeLillo’s deeply serious counter-terrorism novel Falling Man, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers and Michael Cunningham’s three-part novella Specimen Days. These texts return repeatedly to the spectre of the dead bodies of the event, and these novels contain a paradoxical fascination with the absent body and a desire for its recovery. Taken together, I argue that this broadcasts a certain knowingness about the status of the body, but also a hopefulness in spite of this knowledge: the wish to retrieve the body in fiction is, of course, a fantasy. This paradox also reveals a particular wish to mediate the event of 9/11; to in some way negotiate the difficult post-9/11 terrain regarding the real lost bodies. Crucially for my argument, Yaeger’s generative reading of the fragmented body, whereby “part-objects” can be reconstituted, operates both in terms of a narrative function and further as mode of analysing the event itself. Drawing on Yaeger’s account, and using the Freudian account of fort/da, I will argue that both the material losses of 9/11 such as the Twin Towers and the corporeal losses sustained operate within the fiction as objects that need to be retrieved and replaced. In this way, the insistent desire for and focus on corporeality in the texts can be understood as both a compensatory response to and a reaction against the material and corporeal losses incurred.
The second category of novels references the dead body – or the imagined dead body – of a person close to the protagonist: often a parent or sibling. Viewed together, these novels enable us to identify the symbolic function of the familial and how it presents as a metonymy for the larger losses of the event. Here, I will examine William Gibson’s technological thriller Pattern Recognition, Jess Walter’s dark satire The Zero, Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s complex, linguistically-aware The Writing on the Wall and Joyce Maynard’s teen fiction novel The Usual Rules. These novels, with their highly disparate 58 tones and styles, demonstrate the prevalence of the dead parental and filial 9/11 body across a range of genres and in a variety of different deployments. The texts enable us to analyse these various genres, perspectives and temporalities that, despite their differences, still perform substitutes. By using these texts, I will chart the different narrative methods and functions deployed in order both to demonstrate and counter the problematics of representation through corporeality, such as the wish to imbibe the lost body and the desire to resurrect the lost parent, which recur in the novels.
By applying my theoretical model, the first section of my argument will examine various types of corporeal substitution in figuration. Bill Brown notes that after 9/11, allegory “substitutes hermeneutic certainty for cartographic clarity while sharing the same incorporative ambitions” (“The Dark Wood of Postmodernity”, 737). Here I draw together the reasons as to why metonym is such a powerful mode for the fiction of 9/11, given that the event is itself steeped in both material and abstract domains. I argue that one of the primary ways of negotiating the dilemmas of corporeal representation pertaining to 9/11 is through the use of figurative operations. In fact, metonymy is the most appropriate operation with which to view the novels of 9/11: the operation itself offers a reading whereby we can appreciate the real and a shadow or resonance of the real. In this way, we can read the “Tribute in Light” memorial as a metonym as it both stands in for the Twin Towers and is a monument in its own right: it is a shadow of the Twin Towers. Following this pattern, the body in the novels of 9/11 metonymically stands as a symbol for the larger devastation, but of course it also stands for its literal self; it is at once both its own object and concurrently a symbol or shadow of another object.
In this way, metonymy functions as a mode through which the enormity of the event is represented in the novels of 9/11. Metonymy is also deeply embedded in the real event of 9/11 itself: the Twin Towers were in fact and in symbolic terms vivid emblems of trade,77 power,78 and American exceptionalism,79 and
77 Laurie Kerr, “The Mosque to Commerce: Bin Laden's Special Complaint with the World Trade Center.” Slate, 2001. 78 Nancy Gibbs, “If You Want to Humble an Empire.” Time 14 September 2001, 15. 79 Mike Davis, “The Flames of New York.” New Left Review 12 (2001): 35. 59 in their absence, have variously been read as representing symbols of terrorism,80 hope and resistance81 and American hubris.82 Further, the tendency to anthropomorphise the Twin Towers results in highly corporeal types of metonymy being utilised across the range of novels. In order to analyse these types of bodies and how they come to be symbolic or emblematic in the novels, I will present a close reading of the “Portraits of Grief” series, a collection of obituaries featured in the New York Times, and examine the ways in which they have been narrativised within the novels as substitute and alternative bodies. The crossings between the two domains of reality and fiction illustrate the complexity of substitution; that it can operate both as a fictional operation where characters wish to create a new body within a novel. But further, and recalling Barthes’ idea of the work and the text, the very literary artefact can act as a replacement or substitute offering for the losses of the event: that the materiality of the book seeks to “make something out of nothing” (Stamelman, 15) in the aftermath.
The wish to create a fictional substitute body moves us to a discussion of the ways in which the trope of the twin is played out in different forms across all of the novels, and how such a trope directly engages with the paradox of absence and presence: the missing twin seeming to signify the ultimate untenability of the Twin Towers. In the novels, the trope of the twin moves between the desire to replicate the doubling of the towers, and the feared impossibility of so doing. In this discussion, the body as a metonym functions to represent the larger devastation of the event, coming to stand-in as a proxy for the real horror. In this way, the various modes of metonymic substitution operate not only to attempt to replace or stand in for the lost body, but also to demonstrate and come to terms with its absence.
In the second part of my argument, my analysis will follow a line across various modes of fictional substitution and their respective proximities to, and
80 Timothy Rayner, “Time and the Event: Reflections on September 11, 2001.” Theory and Event 5.4 (2002). 81 Miles Orvell, “After 9/11: Photography, the Destructive Sublime, and the Postmodern Archive.” Michigan Quarterly Review 45.2 (2006): 238-256. 82 Diane Cole, “Rebuilding Ground Zero.” Science and Spirit: Exploring Things That Matter (2006) http://www.science-spirit.org/article_detail.php?article_id=660 (accessed 10 March 2007). 60 intensities with, the body, utilising a narratological lens through which to look at objects in the plot and thematic preoccupations. Indeed, the preoccupation with creating various substitute bodies points to the problematics of commemorating the lost body, and goes to the heart of the fictional dilemma regarding both the limits and the necessity of reconstructing and re-animating the absent bodies of 9/11. The conflicting, and sometimes coterminous expression of corporeal representation through the desire to substitute can be read as an attempt to reanimate and resurrect the absent body and to substantiate it anew. The “Tribute in Light” memorial again illuminates the difficulty of commemoration and representing these same lost bodies in the symbolic domain. In this discussion I identify the key, often conflicting operations of this move to substitution, namely and in order: the creation of proxy bodies, inhalation, consumption, hysterical substitution and historical replacement. These various modes of corporeal substitution recur across the novels in ways that underscore the untenability of the body, however they are coupled with an oppositional wish to recover or substitute the absence of the body regardless.
Each mode of substitution identified in 9/11 novels performs a distinctive inflection of loss and recovery. Further, the performances of loss and attempted recovery go to the very heart of the corporeal dilemma within narrative: the texts must fall short and fail to substitute the body in order to recognise and mark the reality of the losses sustained. The novels must perform true losses by demonstrating a common and ultimate inability to find a substitute for the lost body. Just as the vehicle of the body enables authors to speak after trauma, it must also deny resurrection and concede that the body of 9/11 is irretrievable or lost forever.
The novels of 9/11 not only draw on the bodies of 9/11 for their subject but also how they can also be seen as offering themselves as a substitute body. This discussion, then, returns us to the complex and paradoxical patterning I argue characterises the novels of 9/11 in the form of the double chiasmus of presence and absence, of speech and silence. For the acknowledged limitations of the artefact – its point of failure to provide presence – performs a 61 progression from fetishistic disavowal to the acknowledgment of loss.
Part I: Figurative Modes of Substitution In this first section of the chapter, I will investigate how the metonymic aesthetic operates when taken with the desire for the return of the lost body. Crucially, metonym is itself particularly deeply embedded in 9/11 novels, as the event of 9/11 was one steeped in both the material and abstract worlds. Pre-9/11, the Twin Towers existed in forms far beyond their physical presence; as, for example, guardians of the city and as emblems of trade and commerce. It follows that these symbols were also attacked on 9/11, and added another violent dimension to the initial, material damages sustained. As architectural theorist Robert Bevan notes in his book The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War: [a]ttacks on buildings and cities can have a symbolic power all of their own, in fact as well as fiction, which is why strikes against them have been favoured by terrorists or in conflicts even when their leveling gives no direct military advantage. Victory is rarely expected from the act itself (62).83
Bevan’s observation underscores the power of metonymic damage, and the ability of an attack to initiate injury in “fact as well as fiction”. In this way, metonym is a highly appropriate literary vehicle with which to conceptualise and write about the Twin Towers as they already existed in the symbolic realm in reality.
Such metonymic destruction links back to the body, as the symbolic power of the Twin Towers was also heightened and made more complex due to their anthropomorphism. Such an embodiment is also played out through the ways in which the demise of the Towers was conceptualised: Baudrillard notes in The Spirit of Terrorism, “[s]o the towers, tired of being a symbol which was too heavy a burden to bear, collapsed… Their nerves of steel cracked. They collapsed vertically, drained of their strength” (49). Here, Baudrillard makes explicit the links between the physical, material buildings and bodies, projecting and transferring nerves and strength to the inanimate skyscrapers.84 This type
83 While the event of 9/11 was comprised of the attacks on the Twin Towers, the Shanksville crash and the Pentagon attack, the fiction fuses all three and focuses primarily on the trauma of the Twin Towers. 84 Graphic novelist Art Spiegelman also takes up corporeal descriptions of the towers, and writes of the “bones of the tower”; Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, (New York: 62 of anthropomorphism produces complex and fertile metonymic opportunities for the fiction that counterintuitively and reflexively uses the Towers as a substitute for people, and more commonly, can construct people to stand in for the absence of the Towers. Indeed, in an article published about one month after 9/11, the New York Times journalist Peter Marks claimed that the now- absent Twin Towers were “our phantom limb. You feel it but it's not there; you look to where you feel it should be” (A1). Such a statement reveals the links between the absence, body and metonym: the “phantom limb” suggests the persistent and material reminder that is taken up in bodies in the novels, as I will go on to outline.
Importantly, the use of figurative operations such as metonymy can better enable speech about 9/11, due to the ability to deflect the horror of the event through the use of a symbol instead of the real object, which can be too confronting to represent. Such acts of substitution offer a mode through which to re-inscribe the event in literature; one that can safely describe certain aspects without fear of being too graphic or exploitative. Critically, metonym locates us in the complex symbolisation of replacement aligned with simulacra and replication: the conventional terrain of the postmodern. Recalling the paradoxes set up at the outset of the thesis, the authors of 9/11 novels oscillate between the two poles of speech and silence: between wanting to offer the event a narrative and paying their respects with tactful restraint. In order to demonstrate such replication, I will begin with a study of the “Portraits of Grief” collection and continue the idea of impossible substitution with an analysis of the recurring trope of the twin. Here, even metonymic bodies authorise speech after trauma, and that the various forms of substitution through metonym offer a body particular to 9/11 fiction. Further, these substitutions move between the paradoxes of absence and presence and speech and silence, rendering complex the links between the body, narrative and metonym.
Pantheon, 2004), 4, and in a statement issued post-9/11, even Osama bin Laden claimed that America had been “struck by God Almighty in one of its vital organs”; Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin, “The Rhetoric of Monument Making: The World Trade Center.” Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, Eds. Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 315. 63
The “Portraits of Grief” Series The “Portraits of Grief” series can be read as enabling a particular mode of substitution that occurs through literal and metonymic iterations. Specifically, these types of substitution interrogate the problematics of absence, the particular pull of the dead body and the ability of the body to authorise speech. In fact, here bodies became the literal portals through which writers could speak about 9/11: as if by beginning with the lost body, they could authorise the re-telling of the broader event.
After the event of 9/11, the New York Times published a now well-known series entitled “Portraits of Grief”, each comprised of an individual photograph and short obituary of the victims.85 This series began as a collection of the “missing” posters that were put up in the aftermath, and became a compilation of extended death notices.86 These Portraits were published daily, and were eventually compiled into a book, and draw heavily on the missing posters that were put up in the city in the wake of the attacks.87 Here, the previously faceless and nameless victims are re-embodied in newspaper form: their real absence substituted by a material narrative. As Jennifer Wallace writes: [t]o those who had disappeared without trace… [the “Portraits of Grief”] gave back a recognizable solid body, even if only in the form of a text... [they] tried to give shape to the September massacre by transforming ordinary lives into significant narratives” (“‘We Can't Make More Dirt...': Tragedy and the Excavated Body”, 104).
The “Portraits of Grief” were not, however, without their controversy. Recalling the difficulty of speech in the aftermath, Daniel Harris notes how the series, “emotional pornography” in his words, encouraged in the public an inappropriate and voyeuristic inclination. He suggests, “we were acting as
85 Janny Scott, “Closing a Scrapbook Full of Life and Sorrow.” New York Times 31 December 2001, Late (East Coast) ed.: B6. Further, photographer Lorie Novak took many photographs of missing posters in the aftermath of 9/11. For an evocative account of these, see Novak, “Photographs.” Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 87-94. 86 Mark Seltzer notes that it “has by now become commonplace to observe that crisis, catastrophe, accident, and collective destruction center on mass corporeal violence: ‘bodies strewn everywhere’”; Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture, (London, New York: Routledge, 1998), 35. Seltzer’s articulation of the specifically American preoccupation with and incorporation of “torn and open bodies” is highly applicable to the event of 9/11 and can be read as offering an account of the Portraits’ ability to command a significant spectatorial audience. 87 The “Portraits of Grief” series were also later compiled into a book: Janny Scott, ed. Portraits: 9/11/01: The Collected “Portraits of Grief” From the New York Times, (New York: Times Books, 2002). 64 aesthetes of grief, competing to see who could beat their breasts and gnash their teeth most piteously” (6). Further, Thomas Mallon suggests that the framing of the Portraits effectively effaced the subjects’ corporeality, such that they became “smile-button cyborgs” (7). He writes, “where anyone depressed over his weight became a “gentle giant” and every binge drinker was the life of the party” (7). Clearly there exist manifold difficulties with such a mode of representation in reality: the inherent bias, the commodification of lives and the selective memorialisation to name but a few problems with such a mediated series.88 In fact, it is the contentious status and very inadequacy of the Portraits’ ability to represent the body that further underscores the failure of the body; an idea that highlights my argument about the paradoxical status of the body within 9/11 narratives.
Indeed, not only do the Portraits offer a proxy “significant narrative” for the lost body, substituting absence for a form of presence, they are also a conduit through which readers can engage with the event of 9/11. Canonical New York novelist Paul Auster writes of the Portraits that, “one felt... real lives were jumping out at you. We weren't mourning an anonymous mass of people, we were mourning thousands of individuals. And the more we knew about them, the more we could wrestle with our own grief” (Wallace, “‘We Can't Make More Dirt...’: Tragedy and the Excavated Body”, 103-104). Viewed in this way, the “Portraits of Grief” collection acts as a substitute for that which is no longer there, allowing survivors and observers of 9/11 to replace, in a sense, the lost bodies with re-animated textual ones.
The desire to reanimate and replace the lost body by reframing it as a narrative is carried through to the novels themselves where a two-fold process of substitution occurs. On the one hand, the real, lost body of the event is substituted with a narrative. But on the other, by utilising the Portraits in an
88 Furthermore, some critics received public pressure to bow to the alleged symbolic power of the portraits. The late writer Susan Sontag received public pressure when she conceded the “courage” of the 9/11 terrorist pilots and deplored the way politics had been “replaced by psychotherapy” in article in The New Yorker; Sontag, “The Talk of the Town.” The New Yorker 24 September 2001: 32. Thomas Mallon points out Sontag later seemingly capitulated to her own charge and told the New York Times, “I read the “Portraits of Grief”, every last word, every single day. I was tremendously moved. I had tears in my eyes every morning”; Mallon, “The Mourning Paper.” American Scholar 71.2 (2002): 7. 65 overt sense, the novels of 9/11 engage with the impossibility of a narrative being able to act as an adequate substitute in the first place. Such an ironic admission leads us to surmise that the process of substitution occurs as a compulsion throughout the novels of 9/11, in spite of a profound knowingness concerning the limits of representation. Just as the Portraits represent the individual and also stand in for the multitude of other lost bodies, so too does the fiction use words to represent and stand for lost fictional bodies.
In the futuristically styled Pattern Recognition, the “Portraits of Grief” series recurs as a motif that underscores the problems of replacing the lost body. After 9/11, Cayce refuses to believe her father has died in the attacks, yet finally gives in and makes him a “missing” poster eight days after the event when, “Win’s face had joined the others, so many of them, that Cayce had been living with daily in the aftermath” (185). The move to place Win’s face on a poster is one of the first of Cayce’s reluctant steps to acknowledging her father’s passing. On her journey of grief, it is actually the posters of the missing which permit her to begin mourning: [s]till more missing strangers had become familiar, then, as she’d made the stations of some unthinkable cross. She had, while producing her own posters, watched the faces of other people’s dead, emerging from adjacent copiers at Kinko’s, to be mounted in the yearbook of the city’s loss. She had never, while putting hers up, seen one face pasted over another, and that fact, finally, had allowed her to cry (186).
Here, a fictional character performs substitution through the very work of production of these posters, which seems an apt metaphor for Cayce, who is always in the domain of reproductions; whether grappling with the online footage or in her job working in advertising with the endless repetition of the simulacrum. In fact, Cayce attempts to stage a recovery of her father’s missing body through focusing on his retrieval, albeit in poster form. Further, the Christian reference to “stations of some unthinkable cross” aligns the last stages of Christ’s death Cayce’s own laboured journey, making physical stops along her grieving process. This reference also links to the Christian acts of communion and transubstantiation that may also be termed, with respect, fetishistic, which also seek to replace and re-embody the lost body.89 Win’s
89 Marita Sturken notes “how quickly the site [of Ground Zero] become Christianized”; Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero.” American Ethnologist 31.3 (2004): 314. 66 ghostly replacements, in the form of photocopied photographs as missing posters, form their own “Portrait of Grief” in the novel, attempting to stand-in for his missing body.
The substitutive operation of the Portraits is underscored in Falling Man by a fictional desire to create a narrative for a missing person. The acknowledged power of the “Portraits of Grief” to substitute that which has become lost is exemplified in this novel where the eponymous character himself is left with no story to fill his absence. In Falling Man, the dead performance artist named David Janiak, also known as the ‘Falling Man’, dies towards the end of the novel. One of his performance pieces was well-known to the character of Lianne: he used to dress in a suit, carry a briefcase, and suspend himself from buildings in the city, hanging in a perpetual fall. In the aftermath of 9/11, his acts took on a macabre and prophetic power, as businessmen and women had indeed tumbled to their deaths: an iconic and morbid New York image. Lianne is shocked to read about the death of Janiak, but her real sadness comes from the fact that there is no personifying or humanising obituary. As Lianne reads the newspaper: [t]he force of this obituary did not register at once. A man named David Janiak, 39. The account of his life and death was brief and sketchy, written in haste to make a deadline, she thought. She thought there would be a complete report in the paper of the following day. There was no photograph, not of the man and not for the acts that had made him, for a time, a notorious figure (218- 219).
The idea that the death of a stranger was not given a “complete report” or photographs in memorialising his death fictionally speaks to the recurring postmodern conception of the body. It is the bodies that have actually disappeared which are offered substitutes in the form of Portraits, while the virtual falling man, Janiak, who enacted a representation of the fall, is left with no substitute body, for he was himself a substitute, or simulacrum in Baudrillard’s terms. Lianne’s obvious distress at the lack of photograph to accompany the obituary also underlines the very problematics of whether
Further, Sheldon Wolin notes that the “mythology created around September 11 was predominantly Christian in its themes. The day was converted into the political equivalent of a holy day of crucifixion, of martyrdom, that fulfilled multiple functions: as the basis of a political theology... as a warning against political apostasy”; Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 9. 67 words can ever encapsulate or properly do justice to the lost bodies: the project (and in some cases, anxiety) with which 9/11 novelists engage.
Alongside the narrative desire to resurrect and substitute the lost other through the form of narrative, whether in the “Portraits of Grief” series like in Pattern Recognition or in a normal obituary in Falling Man, there is a co-existing knowingness that this process of substitution is not actually a means of re- animating the lost bodies of the event. In the real aftermath of 9/11, Nancy K. Miller interrogates the possibility that a “Portrait of Grief” may not be a complete or accurate representation, and writes, “I have been unable to keep myself from wondering about the stories the details aren’t telling” (122, emphasis added). The ability of an anecdote concerning an individual’s life to be an appropriate (and accurate) representation of such a life is, of course, highly suspect. However, inextricably, even when people’s lives have been ‘fleshed out’ in mini portraits – such a description itself underscores the wish to resurrect through the detail – absence remains the most pervasive aspect of such a recovery. The details that aren’t there are those that paradoxically overwhelm, and further, invite the most speculation. As an editorial in the New York Times commented on the Portraits, “[e]ach profile is only a snapshot, a single still frame lifted from the unrecountable complexity of a lived life, and there is a world more to know about each of these victims, as their survivors understand only too well” (“Among the Missing”, 4.12). Working within the very dilemma of the absence and presence contained within the Portraits, Miller stresses the metonymic relation of the Portraits and continues: [t]he Portraits... are based not on the sharp immediacy of recent loss but on the distilled temporality of recollection... Like the emotional addition that calculates individual loss through the “little things”, what adds up in the affective economy of the detail only appears to be a paradox of scale: the loss is so great that the only way to bring it to language is to think small, cutting it down to size. You accede to the big through the little: the “telling detail” testifies to the big whole, the hole left by the disappearance of the loved one within the global identity of victim (122-123).
Miller’s description of “bring[ing]” loss “to language” turns us towards the very process of fictionalising the Portraits series: the personification of the tragedy through the “telling detail” of the small, manageable Portrait operates as a mechanism through which to make personal a bigger, faceless event. In this way, the fictionalised Portraits act as substitute bodies to mediate the broader 68 trauma and simultaneously represent both absence and presence paradoxically. Indeed, the real “Portraits of Grief” underline the problems and limits of realism, and further focus the literature of 9/11 to focus on the frightening lost body itself.
The novels of 9/11 also draw on the “Portraits of Grief” series satirically, to seek a substitute for an imagined loss. The Good Life portrays the grief experienced by those who did not lose a loved one, and yet still felt implicated by the event and experienced a need to create a substitute for the loss sustained, or in this case, imagined. Here, the character of Corrine is the mother of twins, Storey and Jeremy, who have an imaginary family named the ‘fluffies’ who live in their bedroom. The fluffies are “like fairies, with their own little house and furniture and their own tiny tea set, and they come out at night when everybody’s asleep” (297). However post-9/11, even the inanimate fluffies suffer a trauma: “[o]ne of the fluffies is missing… His name is Bevan. We made a poster for him. A missing poster” (297). The absorption of the status quo missing posters – a quotidian event in downtown Manhattan – into the lives of the young twins is a telling move: the twins’ desire to feel a part of the movement of mourning is an attempt to communicate with the broader societal grief. Here, the twins demonstrate the desire to find their lost, imaginary friend, using a poster to represent that absence. However, that an invisible member of an invisible family can go missing is the text’s ironic take on loss and the absent body. In fact, such an overt engagement with the imagined absent body also recalls Harris’ notion of being “aesthetes of grief”: the construction here of imaginary characters mourning a made-up (and non- existent) body can be read as an indictment of the ways in which people ‘mourned’ the event without any real investment in it. McInerney’s use of a child’s conception of a fictional missing poster underscores the impossibility of recreating or rediscovering the material absence, even in the imaginary domain of the fiction. In this way, the operation of substitution here suggests the deep wish to replace the absent bodies of 9/11, yet it also points to the impossibility of so doing through the ironic deployment of an imaginary absent body.
69
Crucially, the novels’ engagement with the “Portraits of Grief” series illustrates the complex crossings between reality and fiction in the 9/11 oeuvre, and emphasises the ways in which substitutes are sought for the lost body through the operation of metonym. The desire then, to turn the “nothing” of the event into “something”, be it an object, narrative or myth, is well-exemplified in the modes through which the Portraits recur across the range of literature, drawing a reader back to the primacy of the body. Just as the real “Portraits of Grief” seek to stand in for the real lost body, so too do the fictional Portraits wish to re-animate the lost body within the novel. Of course, the various attempts to find a metonymic substitute body, either through the literal replication of their image in missing posters, such as in Pattern Recognition; the obituary in Falling Man or the ironic missing poster for the imaginary family member in The Good Life all fail. Related to these failed replications, the “Tribute in Light” memorial is just that: despite the designers’ wishes to “repair and rebuild the skyline” (Bonevardi, para 4) with its presence, it ultimately underscores the very devastation of 9/11. Such a pattern of the failure of substitution is overdetermined even further by the trope of the twin, and I will examine their complex fictional deployment which also attempts to substitute the losses of the event, both at the levels of the body and architecture.
Twins in the Novels of 9/11 Much of the literature of 9/11 utilises the highly overdetermined and bodily trope of the twin90 – drawing on the emblematic, highly personified91 Twin Towers – in ways that complicate the idea of substitution and draw on the paradox of absence and presence. Various manifestations of different types of twins – the lost twin, the divorced couple, the dead twin, the dead parents – recur across the novels as an inevitable trope adopted from the catastrophe that was so steeped in doubles and repetition.92 The twins in the novels oscillate between acting as substitutes for the Twin Towers, and as symbols of
90 For an extensive study of twins in arts and history, see, for example, John Lash, Twins and the Double, (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1993) and Juliana de Nooy, Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Look Twice, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 91 Daniel Harris proposes that after 9/11, the “buildings quickly lost their material reality as architecture and became living beings, ‘two brothers’ endowed with the capacity to move, to ‘reach,’ ‘stretch, and ‘stand tall’”; Harris, “The Kitschification of Sept. 11.” Salon.com, 2002, 3. 92 For an insightful analysis of the double in the event of 9/11, see Gregory T. Esplin, “Double or Nothing: The Uncanny State of Post-9/11 America.” Philament 1.6 (2005) (www.arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament/issue6_contents.htm) 70 the untenability of the double in the wake of 9/11. Taking up the horror at the dissolution of New York’s most famous twins, a common theme within the novels of 9/11 is the attempt to reanimate the body of the lost twin, as if suggesting that their departure could presage their return in the imaginary domain of fiction. Indeed, the use of the twin trope recalls the dilemmas of absence and presence of the “Portraits of Grief” collection, and calls upon the Freudian conception of fort/da: of being simultaneously both here and gone. In his well-known text, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature, Robert Rogers notes of such a symbolic reading of twins, “[w]hen an author portrays a protagonist as seeing his [sic] double, it is… a result of his sense of the division to which the human mind in conflict with itself is susceptible” (29). In the novels of 9/11, it is more properly the body itself that represents the conflict: the repetition inherent in the event leads to a yearning for the return of that lost body. The conflict of which Rogers notes is manifested in the ways the novels of 9/11 alternate between the desire to substitute the lost twins or to accept their loss as final.
The novels of 9/11 reveal patterns that paradoxically both enable and deny characters to accept the corporeal losses of the event when viewed through a Freudian fort/da reading. In Michael Cunningham’s novel Specimen Days, the resuscitation of the existence of the lost other is attempted through the substitution of an object. In the first part of the novel, set in the American industrial revolution, the protagonist Lucas’s brother Simon dies, and Simon’s girlfriend, Catherine, seeks to replace his loss. Early in the novel, she gives a locket to Lucas: She pulled [the]… chain up over her head, held locket and chain in her palm. She said, “I want you to wear this.” “I can’t,” he said. “It has a lock of your brother’s hair inside.” “I know. I know that.” “Do you know,” she said, “that Simon wore its twin, with my picture inside?” “Yes” (24). Here, the symbolic gift of the locket that contains a part of Simon’s hair is sought to substitute and re-animate his presence when worn by his brother, Lucas. The fact that Catherine wore “its twin” suggests she seeks not only to resuscitate the lost body of Simon in Lucas, but subsequently, to reanimate 71 their actual twinhood. In fact, Catherine’s loss is itself twofold: it is both of the man she loved, and also of her perceived other half.
In Specimen Days, the character (and body) of Simon, although a pre-9/11 character (he dies in the 1800s in the novel), can be read as a symbol and as proleptic of the separation of the Twin Towers who are later to stand in New York City. Writing on loss and psychoanalytic theory, critic Tammy Clewell notes: [m]otivated by a desire to master loss, overcome contingency, and assert the primacy of identity, writers… overcome grief by translating the lost other into a work of art that may succeed in expanding the limits of representation, but that still effaces the radical otherness of what it translates (52).
The notion of “transforming the lost other into a work of art” relates to the post- 9/11 texts which seek to transform the losses into literature, and subsequently, to resurrect the lost body from the catastrophe. Further, Simon is the novel’s replacement for the lost body of 9/11: we experience his life and death as a substitute narrative for the event of 9/11.
The replacement of the lost object, or at least attempt to do so, operates here on two levels. First, the text deals with the losses that the characters sustain: by remembering or replacing Simon in some way, Catherine and Lucas both come to understand the extent of the loss suffered. Second, the greater losses of 9/11 are explicitly referenced through the setting of Specimen Days in New York, and further, the prefiguring in this story of the attacks on the World Trade Center: here alluded to with a great conflagration. I argue that this novel can be read through the lens of Freud’s fort/da: that these losses and substitutes are used to rehearse the real losses of 9/11. Further, this attempt to resuscitate the lost other is an overt attempt on the part of the fiction to reanimate the material losses sustained. Of course, the attempted substitution of Simon with Lucas operates as an overt reminder of Simon’s absence: Lucas becomes the evocation of Simon’s absence, the “place from which emanates the narrative dynamic” (32) in Brooks’ terms.
Just as an object with the physical trace of the lost object seeks to act as a substitute for the lost body in Specimen Days and presages the trauma of 9/11, the fort/da operation fails in Joyce Maynard’s teen fiction novel The 72
Usual Rules. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist Wendy’s best friend moves neighbourhoods before 9/11, rupturing the twin-like friendship both had maintained previously. The two girls, Wendy and Amelia, had been: best friends... since first grade. In third grade, they'd tied their desks together, until the teacher made them cut the string. They had invented a language nobody else understood. Later they made up all kinds of other things, too. Like saying Bloody Mary ten times very fast and daring each other to give the cutest boy on their subway a blue M & M right before they got off at their stop… Last year when Amelia’s family got their new apartment in Brooklyn Heights, it felt like the worst thing that ever happened to Wendy (16).
Here, Wendy and Amelia are constructed as twins, as two halves of a greater whole. The two actually engage in games of departure together, such as giving a stranger the M & M chocolate “right before they [get] off at their stop” and tying their desks together, which as a move itself can only result in division. Not only is the move away from her twin “the worst thing that ever happened to Wendy”, but also external forces, such as the teacher who made them cut the string, and Amelia’s family moving away, thwart their friendship. The very fort/da mechanisms that Wendy and Amelia enact in order to anticipate and therefore cope with their separation do not, in fact, effectively operate to help them comprehend their real life departure. Instead, Wendy laments this lost friendship within the novel, and in many ways conflates it with the event of 9/11, and losing her mother – her other close female – at the hands of another. For Wendy, the material losses of 9/11 resonate and rebound further, as she loses more people around her, even after the event. In this way, The Usual Rules demonstrates a compounded or overdetermined iteration of the twin motif, as the loss of the twin is repeated and compounded, and no substitute is found.
The contradictory function then, of the fort/da operation suggests that while characters such as Wendy in 9/11 fiction desire the recovery and substitution of the lost other, figured as a psychic mirror and filial double, they must also accept the absence of the missing body. In this way, the novels suggest that while the twin may have been sustainable pre-9/11, it has become untenable in the aftermath.
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In Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, the concept of the twin is held up as the ideal before 9/11, yet there is a concession that such a pairing is, in fact, unsustainable after trauma. In the novel the trope of the twin is used to refer to two married couples, who remain together despite having marital difficulties before 9/11. In the aftermath, one of the wives, Corrine, embarks on an affair with the husband of the other couple, Luke. Continuing the narrative preoccupation with twins, Corrine refers to Aristophanes’ speech in The Symposium, where twins are not, in fact, biologically so, but pairs or partners in life: the “one person who was meant for each of us” (244). Corrine says to Luke, with whom she has had an affair in the aftermath, “these sundered twins walk the earth searching for each other, for their lost half. That's how I always thought of us” (244). The allusion to Aristophanes recalls the two halves that were contained in the one body, but that were split apart after the fall.93 Such a reference speaks directly to the failure of the twin in the aftermath: the affair marks the end of the ideal pairing. Despite the fact that Corrine and Luke eventually end their affair and begrudgingly return to their respective spouses, 9/11 is both the catalyst for their initial separation, and denotes the destruction of their former couplings.
Recalling the concept of fort/da, it is as if the game of departure operated through the collapse of the towers, and was repeated in the failed partnerships in the novel. To further the sense of punishment for immorality, at the end of the novel when Corrine and Luke return to their spouses, the narrator suggests: [s]he was his lost twin, his sundered other half, and after half a lifetime he had found her, and now would let her go. Of course they would speak again, tomorrow or the next day, in the park or on the brown lawn under the bare trees of Bowling Green, if only to comfort each other and flagellate themselves (352).
Crucially, it is the physical sundering and surgical separation that again highlights the primacy of the body: this emphasis on the corporeal untenability returns us to the impossibility of the Twin Towers, as their doubleness was also doomed to fail. Also, the “bare trees of Bowling Green” allude to the trees that no longer stand in the protective shadow of the towers themselves in
93 Aristophanes’ speech is recorded in Plato’s The Symposium; Plato. The Symposium. Trans. Christopher Gill, (London: Penguin, 2003). 74
Lower Manhattan, again reinforcing the changes for these twins – and the Twin Towers, in the aftermath.
Indeed, the impossibility of doubles is reiterated with Corrine’s own twins, who were conceived using her sister’s eggs, prompting another twinning: the twin children have a pairing of mothers; one biological and one birth. After 9/11, Corrine worries not that the twins will become separated from each other, but they will love their aunt – and biological mother – more than they will love her. Here, the character of Corrine seems to connect the destruction of the Twin Towers with the potential ruination of her own twins. Also, she fears her own ‘twin’ in motherhood; her sister. Here, the way that the impossibility of the double has been revealed by the event of 9/11 resonates and is extrapolated to other pairings in the novel, as if imbuing the Towers with the symbol of the ultimate untenable nature of doubleness.
While the twinned body can signal the failure of doubleness, it can also set in motion a complex series or pattern of horizontal movements, echoing Derrida’s well-known “endless referral”94 of meaning. Political theorist David McNally notes that Derrida claims a “transcendental signified – a determined measure of linguistic value – removes signs from their endless referral to one to another by endowing them with positive values and fixed meanings” (58).95 Given the lack of fixed meanings in 9/11 novels, where I suggest representation tends to be paradoxical in nature, it is inevitable that meaning seems to be endlessly referred, in this case, across a horizontal plain. As if recognising that the substitute body is unobtainable, a horizontal displacement can occur, as characters move from one wished-for substitute to another, finding little solace. In The Good Life, sets of twins encourage or prompt a move to the side: Corrine’s displacement from her biological role of mother by her sister reinforces notions of untenable twinhood,
94 I am grateful to Elizabeth McMahon for suggesting this idea. 95 See also Demelza Marlin, “Saussure and the Elusive Question of the Origin.” Semiotica 172 (2008): 185-200 and Joseph G. Kronick, Derrida and the Future of Literature, (Albany: State University of New York, 1999), 14. 75
Impossible substitution and “endless referral” is further played out where an initial desire for doubleness is utilised in post-9/11 narratives as a literal representation of a pre-9/11 New York. In Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall, the characters of Renata and Claudia are twins, and as children, delight in the pleasures of doubleness: they speak a language that only they can understand, and know each other’s intimate thoughts and secrets. In many ways, Schwartz portrays the twins as half a person each, as though one would only be complete with the other. She writes: [t]o Renata and Claudia, being twins meant something of quite another order. It meant relief, immunity, from what they imagined as a painful isolation: living as the only one bearing this particular face, this body. They each knew what it felt like to live behind the same face, and they marvelled that others could bear their singularity. Everyone could look in a mirror, but mirrors abandon you the moment you turn your back. Mirrors couldn’t be companions. They were two faithful mirrors, companionable mirrors (32).
Although the twins are “faithful [and] companionable” for many years, it is Claudia who rebels against being a twin: “Claudia was changing. For her the common face and common memory had become oppressive. She needed to escape from twinhood. From her twin” (33). Here, “twinhood” intimates danger: that such reflexivity could, in fact, be perceived as an imprisonment or confinement from which one must break free.
After moving further apart, Claudia dies, and it is not revealed whether she was murdered or committed suicide. The remaining twin, Renata, is overwhelmed, and feels – in another move reminiscent of fort/da – as though the destruction of the Twin Towers mirrors the ruin of her own double she, too, has “this body”. Recalling the paradox of absence and presence, Renata concedes, “She [Claudia] was found, but she would forever be among the missing.” (100) After outlining the idyllic childhood of the twins, doubt is later cast as to whether twins are necessarily a sustainable duality. In a flashback towards of the beginning of the novel, the third person narration suggests: [a]ll the latest studies of twins illustrate the uncanny affinities that persist even when the twins are raised apart. They turn out to have similar tastes and aversions; they eat the same foods, play the same games, choose the same sort of lovers. When they’re brought together they fly into each other’s arms. In the face of such research, the old examples from enduring myth tend to be overlooked, the betrayals and the murders – Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Romulus and Remus (33).
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Unusually for a post-9/11 novel, which usually focuses on 9/11 as the catalyst for the end of the twin, The Writing on the Wall uses past examples of violent and sundered twins to presage the dissolution of the main twin relationship in the novel. Unlike the mention of Aristophanes in The Good Life, these twins draw on different mythologies and are violent, and in the case of Romulus and Cain, guilty of fratricide.96
Indeed, The Writing on the Wall is replete with doubles and substitutions in terms of the characters throughout the novel. Bodies constantly stand in for other bodies, and become proxies for lost loved ones, both from the event of 9/11 and before. Even Renata’s own romantic relationship is cast as a substitution: the morning after Renata spends her first night at her partner Jack’s apartment, his ex-wife’s old wedding dress falls out of the wardrobe at her feet (22), signifying the other, phantom partner she replaces. After 9/11, Jack and Renata take care of an infant child, Julio, whose mother died in the attacks, and Renata begins to fantasise that Julio is a replacement for her niece, Gianna, who was kidnapped many years earlier: she even wishes to adopt him (139). After eventually handing Julio over to his grandmother, Renata’s desperation to possess a substitute for Gianna persists. A week later, Renata offers shelter to an adolescent girl who is discombobulated and mute with shock from 9/11. Renata begins to call her Gianna, and when Jack presses her to relinquish her grasp, she insists, “She’s mine! I’ve made her mine!” (267). These complex slippages of identity – it transpires that this girl is called Jenny Halloway, although she was adopted (277), which leaves ambiguous the possibility that she might, in fact, be the real Gianna – reveal the recurring fictional wish to replace the losses sustained by the event of 9/11. Renata is framed as the substitute romantic partner, the remaining twin, the lost mother and the estranged daughter: she is surrounded by failed attempts
96 In Nick McDonell’s The Third Brother (2005), the protagonist Mike has a brother Lyle, who is mentally ill. After 9/11, Lyle is unable to cope with the tyranny of a pairing of brothers – the insupportable double – and he invents a third brother to efface the suffocating pair in which he feels contained. Further, the parents of these brothers are also conceptualised as twins: “[t]hey were husband and wife but sometimes mistaken for siblings. They could have been carved out of the same piece of alabaster” McDonell, The Third Brother, (New York: Grove Press, 2005) 1. Thus from the outset, there is a certain sense of instability and fragility surrounding these two pairings, denoted by the reference to alabaster – a fine-grained and translucent material. In a tragic ending, Lyle kills his parents, commits suicide and blames the ‘third’ imaginary brother for the carnage, thus killing both sets of doomed doubles. 77 to replicate or double; by the collapse of the twin. Further, these various bodies set in train a series of horizontal moves, endlessly referring meaning as they fail to restore Renata’s niece, or even the longed-for son, Julio. This failure at the level of reality and in the symbolic reveals the knowingness that the bodies of 9/11, too, cannot be substituted. Yet using either a fictionalised version of the event, such as in the case of Julio, or another tragedy, such as Gianna’s kidnapping pre-9/11, the wish to replace absence with presence in the form of surrogate, other bodies recurs across the novel. The twins in the 9/11 novels can be read as standing in for the Twin Towers: as if recreating them could figuratively rebuild the towers and offer a substitute or proxy version in the fiction. In The Good Life and The Writing on the Wall, explicit links are made clear between the fall of the Twin Towers and the failure of the twin.
Conversely, in Falling Man, a desire for doubleness is made manifest between husband and wife, coupled with a recognition of its inevitable failure. In the novel, the protagonist couple Keith and Lianne Neudecker are actually separated before the event of 9/11. The separation itself is couched in terms of reflexivity and doubleness: [t]heir separation had been marked by a certain symmetry, the steadfast commitment each made to an equivalent group. He had his poker game, six players, downtown, one night a week. She had her storyline sessions, in East Harlem, also weekly, in the afternoon, a gathering of five or six or seven men and women in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease (29).
This portrayal marks the beginning of the dissolution of this double, as both characters begin to inhabit physical spaces apart from one another. Falling Man utilises 9/11 as a catalyst: when the event occurs in the novel, and the character of Keith escapes his office in the World Trade Center, he and Lianne attempt a reunification. Unlike the other novels that use 9/11 as impetus for dissolution, Falling Man conversely frames the event as a positive reunion. This is described in terms less concerning symmetry and more about possibility and desperation: [t]his is the point I want to make, that we need to stay together, keep the family going. Just us… [with] the idea that we’re permanent. Times like these, the family is necessary. Don’t you think? Be together, stay together? This is how we live through the things that scare us half to death (214).
Here, this description encapsulates the hopelessness of the reunion. The wish for permanency and stability is ultimately rendered impossible. Keith’s wife 78
Lianne realises that such a wish is in fact a fantasy, and DeLillo writes, “[s]he [Lianne] was ready to be alone, in reliable calm, she and the kid, they way they were before the planes appeared that day, silver crossing blue” (236). In this way, the text ultimately eschews a reunification, but only after attempting to reunite in the aftermath.
The body of the twin authorises speech after trauma, and brings together the corporeal dilemmas of absence and presence, with one twin literally departing and the other remaining. In Pattern Recognition, a complicated pattern of representation occurs. The twins in the novel are the Russian Stella and Nora, who are central to protagonist Cayce’s search for the footage, which Cayce believes is a key to her father’s death in 9/11. In fact, Nora is the creator of the footage, and sits for hours editing fragments of a film, and releasing them onto the Internet. Cayce comes to realise that a possible answer to her father’s disappearance lies in another set of twins. However when Cayce meets Stella, Stella explains that Nora is post-traumatised from a bomb explosion by extremists, and in fact produces the footage as a side effect of the trauma. Nora’s injury itself is rooted in doubleness, too: a shrapnel fragment rests “between the lobes” (288) of her brain. Here, it is as if Gibson specifically engages with the idea of a permanent scar from trauma, and places the real shrapnel fragment in Nora’s brain as a symbol for the fragment of fear that exists on a metaphorical level in people who survive trauma.
The double twinning that occurs here: the footage is emanating from a set of twins, Stella and Nora, and from Nora’s brain which has suffered a trauma between the two twin lobes, is a synecdoche for the larger traumas sustained. In Cayce’s case, the twinning relates back to 9/11 and the loss of her father, and in Stella and Nora’s case, Russian extremists and their agendas. Here, the trope of the twin connects the event of 9/11, with Cayce’s father; the wounded body, with Nora; and narrative, with the production of the footage, tracing a line through the threads of this chapter. This twinning reveals the inability for the novels to focus on the enormity of the tragedy they seek to inscribe, and instead centre on the body as a vehicle for authorising speech about the trauma. 79
Through the vehicle of the Freudian fort/da, retrospection and anticipation, the fictional employment of the twin is used to demonstrate the desire to replace the lost body, but demonstrates that this substitution is fraught with complexity. I argue that the narrative preoccupation with twins reveals an insistent return to the real Twin Towers of the event, and in Freudian fort/da terms, a rehearsal of their absence. Combined with this reading, I argue that the simulations of twinhood recall Baudrillard’s simulacrum, as representations of the lost bodies from the event. Twins in the novels, very often explored as broader pairings, too, such as husband and wife, and siblings, can represent the pre-9/11 world. In this way, while the Twin Towers stand, so too do twin relationships within the novel. In the aftermath, most pairings in the novels become fractured: relationships break up and begrudgingly reunite in The Good Life, a twin dies such as in The Writing on the Wall, a couple divorce such as in Falling Man, or a friend moves away as in The Usual Rules.
Part II: Modes of Substitution in Narrative
Having established the ways in which substitution occurs in figuration, the focus of the ensuing discussion takes up modes of substitution in narrative in the novels of 9/11. By analysing the key and often-incompatible types of substitution and replacement, I argue that that the body is critical to providing authorial access to trauma: it is in fact a condition of narratability. This reminds us of narrative theorist Peter Brooks’ discussion of the reciprocal relationship between narratives and bodies, and how each can be inscribed on the other. In fact, the novels both draw on the bodies of 9/11 for their subject and further offer themselves as substitute bodies in place of the real losses sustained in the event. Returning to the paradox of absence and presence, characters within the range of novels at times desire to ingest or hysterically absorb the dead body such as in Cunningham’s Specimen Days, and at others, are repulsed by the “part-objects”, such as in DeLillo’s Falling Man. On the one hand, characters sometimes seek to use an object as a substitute for the body, such as the footage in Pattern Recognition, and on the other, use past dead bodies, such as those from the civil war in The Good Life to act as proxies. 80
This complex and protean body oscillates between the three poles set out in my triangulated model, and reinforces the metonymic idea that the novels focus on a crucial component of 9/11 – in this case, the body – in order to narrativise the immense event itself.
The Absent Body: The Attempt to Substitute What is Not There One of the primary ways in which the practice of substitution occurs across the range of novels is how characters attempt to replace the absence of the lost body with an object or obsession. In Gibson’s thriller Pattern Recognition, the missing character of Win Pollard is incorporated as a narrative device in response to the material devastation of 9/11, and works to propel the narrative and motivate the protagonist Cayce upon her journey. She grapples with the lack of this particular absent body, and in essence replaces his loss with a fixation on “the footage”, snippets of an internet film released through an underground network. Cayce embarks on a voyage to hunt down the maker of this footage, as if to follow, dig and uncover the body of her father. In this way, the footage, a mysterious but findable body of work, becomes the proxy for her missing father: Cayce attempts to replace one body with another body of sorts. Highlighting this substitution when she writes to Stella, the filmmaker’s sister, Cayce conflates her father’s death with the search for the footage: [m]y name is Cayce Pollard. I’m sitting on the grass in a park in London. It’s sunny and warm. I’m 32 years old. My father disappeared on September 11, 2001, in New York, but we haven’t been able to prove he was killed in the attack. I began to follow the footage you’ve been… (254).
Although the footage is not connected in any way to her father’s death, Cayce believes that if she can solve the questions behind its production, she may somehow be closer to understanding what happened to her father; himself a great believer of conspiracy theories having worked for the U.S. government for many years. Here, the absent body is couched as an impossibility, both in terms of its presence and its recovery. Accordingly, it is the substitution of her father with the footage that helps Cayce come to terms with his passing. In Freudian terms, Cayce attempts to enact a recovery to mediate her father’s departure.
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Further, the literary preoccupation with the collapse or dissolution of the body is linked to the narrative reliance on the body for its continuance. This absent body can hold the position of story-teller and story-motivator: it can both propel and hinder the narrative itself. In Brooks’ terms, the narrative relies on the body as a “motor” (32). In Pattern Recognition, Cayce has to only think of her father and it is enough to propel the story forwards, both in terms of Cayce’s career, and her search for the footage; both journeys that seem to be coming closer to one another as the novel progresses. In a later section of the novel, Cayce is in snow-covered London and reflects upon the time when she had first seen Covent Garden with Win. She remembers “Win told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago… the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing something older to emerge” (195). Immediately after Cayce recounts this memory, her phone rings twice, and she organises to meet her boss, and also solves another problem concerning the footage.
Indeed in Pattern Recognition, which is concerned with legibility or decipherability, the absent body of Win can dislocate time through memory, drive the plot and also compel Cayce to search for answers. The very practice of recognising patterns can be extended to operate as a function of narrative itself. In the novel, pattern recognition is the literal ability to see and foresee trends, which is an exercise highly focused on legibility: the protagonist Cayce can ‘read’ a potential trend before it becomes mainstream. Such a move in narrative could be read as a literal practice of the metaphorical desire to gain control over the missing body in the narrative; to search for and to track down the elusive and missing essence of her father.
Despite the fact that Win’s absent body propels the narrative forward, it is towards the end of the novel that Cayce begins to appreciate that her father may, in fact, have died. She recalls a comment her mother had once made, that “when the second plane hit, Win’s chagrin, his personal; and professional mortification at this having happened… would have been such that he might simply have ceased, in protest, to exist” (351). In this description, Cayce lies in bed, “staring up into the dark, hearing the distant drone of a plane. “They never got you, did they? I know you’re gone though.” His very missingness 82 becoming, somehow, him... “Good night,” she says to the dark” (351). Here, the “distant drone of a plane” – an oblique and peculiar reference to 9/11 – brings Cayce’s thoughts directly back to her father, as she decides that it was not the terrorists who killed him. Even now when Cayce finally comes to a recognition concerning Win, she concedes that his “very missingness [was] becoming, somehow, him”. Through these devices, the corporeal problematics of the event – here symbolised by Win’s own absence – are grappled with and incorporated into narrative in order to regain a degree of agency and certainty, even if only in the fictional domain. Replacing Win’s body with the footage counterintuitively leads Cayce to mourn her father’s passing.
Further complicating Cayce’s replacement of her father with the footage is the vast array of confusing simulacra in the novel, which are presented through a critique of globalisation and consumption: the endless and indefinite repetition and dissemination of objects. Such a critique is unsurprising within the post- 9/11 oeuvre, given the propensity for novels to be preoccupied with the ideologies and behaviours that were potentially the reasons for the 9/11 attacks in the first instance. In this way, the novel questions, how can we find replacements when so overtly in a world of replacements? Further, as David Simpson notes, “[i]t was the doubling of the towers that created the opportunity for a second attack identical to the first, thus confirming the image of terrorism as itself opening to an indefinite replication, more and more terror in more and more places” (9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, 58). The fact that there were two towers and that both were destroyed confirmed the idea that terrorism could be indefinitely and unpredictably replicated across time and space, and further provides a link between reproduction and materiality.
Part of the difficulty of talking about the lost bodies of 9/11 in the novels is the stark realisation that they can never be replaced in reality. Almost as if in response to this, in Pattern Recognition, Cayce herself maintains a curious allergy to branding and logos. It is the very practice of advertising that both suggests the endless replication of its product, and as a form, contains unlimited repetitions. As such, advertising is the business of re-packaging the authentic image or product time and time again and forming a replacement for 83 the original: the unfailing substitution that counters the impossible substitutions of 9/11. We can also understand this type of substitution as an obfuscation of the source or the essence of an object in the novel, which relates us back to the difficulty of recreating or rewriting new narratives in the aftermath: underlying these substitutions is an insistent reminder that substitution is, as a practice, impossible. Some logos and brands, such as the Michelin man and Tommy Hilfiger, trigger in her extreme reactions. Cayce looks at a Tommy Hilfiger display and is struck by: [t]his stuff of simulacra of simulacra of simulacra... Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul (17-18).
The “stuff of simulacra of simulacra of simulacra” appears to be the exact opposite of the losses sustained in the attacks of 9/11: that which can never be replicated but has been lost forever. This brings us back to the lost body, which can never be substituted with another simulation expect in the domain of narrative. Of course, the invocation of the simulacrum also directly references Baudrillard’s canonical text on the subject, which further explicitly situates and locates Cayce in the domain of signs and representations.
The preoccupation with this tension between the original and the substitute continues throughout the novel, as Cayce comments on, “a pub of such quintessential pub-ness that she assumes it is only a few weeks old… A terrifyingly perfect simulacrum, its bull’s-eye panes buffed to an optical clarity... Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else” (68). This replication is metonymic of globalisation; itself concerned with “terrifyingly perfect simulacra” in terms of branding, marketing, and international trade. But it is also deeply connected to Cayce’s inability to find the truth – the original – amongst what is named, quoting Baudelaire, the “forest of signs” (125). This type of engagement with materiality speaks directly to the desire to make artificial representations stand-ins for what has been lost, or to use the path through repetition and simulacra to compensate for the material losses sustained by the event. In fact, Pattern Recognition can be read as demonstrating the desire for presence, while simultaneously pointing to the impossibility of actual replacement or substitution. 84
While an object can replace the body of a character, such as in Pattern Recognition, one body can itself also act as a substitute for the body of a missing character in The Usual Rules. In Joyce Maynard’s teen fiction narrative, the 13-year-old protagonist Wendy mourns her mother’s death in the event of 9/11. Despite the fact that Maynard’s narrative begins with Wendy’s mother being alive and portrayed as a highly embodied character – there is much description of her youth as a dancer – the majority of the narrative is filled with the absence of her body. Her mother’s peculiar, embodied non- existence throughout the novel is always highlighted in terms of the primary present body, Wendy: it is Wendy’s grief that keeps the spectre of her mother in close proximity.
At one point in the narrative, Wendy plays dress-up in her mother’s wardrobe and tries on her favourite outfit and: [s]he pulled the black dress over her head and slid her arms into the sleeves. Wendy never knew when it was going to hit her – some little thing that sucked her down into the undertow… She felt her throat tighten, and the bones in her knees seemed to go soft, and when she tried to breathe, the air seemed to sting. She felt dizzy. She wondered if this was how it felt to be drunk... She heard a voice say Mom before she realized the voice was hers. She was on her knees, with her head still buried in the fabric of the dress. It was the perfume that had hit her. Months since her mother had put on this dress, her scent clung to the fabric still. For a moment, it was as if she was there in the room. Wendy wished she could stay in this spot forever, just breathing her in (110).
Here, it is as if Wendy replaces the absent body: her very being becomes the stand-in for her lost mother. Maynard’s evocative description of the “undertow” contains highly physical illustrations: Wendy’s throat tightens, her knees go soft, she feels dizzy and drunk. But further, the effects on Wendy’s own corporeality are predicated by the quasi-embodiment of her mother’s presence. In other words, it is at the moment when Wendy “slid her arms into the sleeves” that the phantom spirit of her mother is reawakened in her own mind. Here, the protagonist is permitted to become a part of the body of the mother; to merge with her within narrative. Indeed, it is the smell of her mother’s perfume that makes Wendy feel “as if she was there in the room” as a ghostly presence. Further, the final sentence of this description: “Wendy wished she could stay in this spot forever, just breathing her in”, references not 85 only Wendy’s grief at her mother’s death, but also her desire to re-embody her mother; both to reanimate and incorporate her lost body.
The substitution of one’s body with another offers a mode through which the absent body returns the protagonist to the past, as the fleeting sense of presence also collapses temporality. While Gibson’s character of Win Pollard works to propel the narrative forward in temporal terms, Maynard’s construction of Wendy’s mother seeks to turn the narrative backwards fetishistically and to deny that any time has passed. In this description, despite not having worn the dress for months, Wendy is surprised that her mother’s scent lingers still and wishes that she could “stay in this spot forever”: that she could deny the passage of time and bring her mother back to the present. In this way, the spectre of Wendy’s mother as a narrative device both allows Wendy to recall the temporal and material aspects of 9/11, but also to replay the event over within the boundaries of her own corporeality. Further, the perceived presence of her mother also works to stop the narrative: Wendy is caught in a temporally static position and can only move forward when she recognises the illusion of her mother’s presence: the failure of the proxy body. Here, the narrative is “inscribed on the body” (Brooks, 1) in ways which gesture to the impossibility of replacement, and to the depth of loss post-9/11.
While novels such as Pattern Recognition and The Usual Rules substitute a lost body with another body, they can also attempt to replace it with another narrative. In Jess Walter’s comic novel, The Zero, an alternative version of 9/11 is mooted by one of the characters. Paul, the protagonist Remy’s outspoken police partner, worries incessantly about the bodies of 9/11, and compulsively talks about them. He says to Remy of the 9/11 body count: [y]ou notice how the number keeps dropping? Eight thousand. Seven thousand? Six. It’s like the swelling going down. I was thinkin’, maybe it’ll go back to zero. You know? I mean, where are the bodies? Maybe it’ll turn out that everyone was at home that day. Maybe we’ll actually gain people when this is all over (24).
The manner in which Paul offers an alternative trajectory for the narrative of 9/11 – “maybe we’ll actually gain people when this is all over” – verges on the ridiculous, yet points to the desire for substitution and the need to incorporate the lost bodies within a new narrative. But it necessarily also points to the 86 failure of such of fantasy: Paul’s conflation of Ground Zero and the number zero with his comment, “maybe [the body count] will go back to zero” in fact represents the impossibility of so doing. This type of anxiety recurs when Remy cautions Paul against saying how happy he is in the aftermath: “I know… what you’re saying.” Remy said quietly. “And maybe you’re right. But there are things we can’t say now. Okay? You can’t say you’ve never been this happy. Even if you think it, you can’t say it. Everything is… there are things… we have to leave them alone. We have to let ‘em sit there, and don’t say anything about ‘em” (12).
The dialogue here represented by ellipse, idiom and elision works to perform the untenability of speech: the words themselves that attempt to describe the impossibility of reanimating bodies or speaking in the aftermath fall short.
Substitution Through Inhalation and Consumption: The Wish to Re- animate The trope of substitution also occurs through the recurring motif of inhalation and the correlating desire to recover the absent body within the novels, which draws on the idea of the impossible proxy in narrative. Such a conception of the body invokes Freud’s idea that “identification is a preliminary stage of object-choice… in which the ego picks out an object. The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and... it wants to do so by devouring it” (Engle, 72). The very practice of devouring is to make an external object part of one’s own body, in an attempt to resurrect and incorporate that which has been destroyed and is no longer whole. Indeed, when Wendy in The Usual Rules wants to “stay in this spot forever, just breathing her in”, she expresses the desire to offer herself as a substitute body, by imbibing and consuming the lost body. The notion of inhaling fragments of dead bodies is one that carries in it both an abject repulsion and a realisation that breath, the very act of life, can ingest fragments of death into the body.
The absent body, once literally inhaled at the site of Ground Zero, is taken up in the novels, with characters coming to fear their own psychic or somatic dissolution. Indeed, the fear of being substituted; of dissolving and evaporating in the trauma recurs for different characters, and is made manifest through their respective fears of contagion. Reading the thematic preoccupations and structure of Jess Walter’s The Zero through the lens of the body reveals a 87 textual obsession with inhalation and substituting the lost body of 9/11. I contend that the character of Remy can be read as a literal embodiment of the problematics of corporeality after 9/11. The narrative of a New York City cop who is overwhelmed by the trauma of 9/11, the novel begins with Remy waking up to discover a head wound after his failed suicide attempt. Thus begins the complex narrative positioning of Remy as both victim and bystander, as whole and shattered, and as both alive and dead. In fact, the character of Remy moves between these extremes throughout the novel, as does the narrative structure as a whole, which is disjointed and non-linear. Further, he is at once whole and fragmented, which suggests his character operates as a symbol for the broader catastrophe of 9/11, explicitly referencing the problematics of rebuilding from debris.
Indeed, the fear of fragmentation recurs across a range of the 9/11 novels, and is made manifest specifically through the trope of the cremated body. In The Zero, a main component of Remy’s trauma concerning 9/11 is his deep-seated fear of fragmentation: that he too has lost his own coherence due to the event. Remy’s fear of disintegration is well exemplified when he panics about the air near Ground Zero: Remy leaned back in his seat and tried to breathe through his mouth. The smell never left him now. It lived in the lining of his nose and the fibers of his lungs – his whole body seemed to smell, as if the odor were working though his pores, the fine gray dust: pungent, flour of the dead. Remy was surprised at the air’s ferocity down here, acrid with concrete dust and the loosed molecules of burned…burned everything (14).
Remy’s concern that the “flour of the dead” is seeping through his skin and permeating his body gives rise to a fear that his own narrative is coming undone. In this way, the character of Remy, in a sense, fears that he may be substituted or that the borders of his own body may collapse, too. The fragmented body – a “part-object” in Yaeger’s terms, is also played out in the narrative structure of The Zero, as the collapse of the body designates the disintegration of the linear narrative. The non-linear and fragmented narrative of The Zero also takes up the permeability experienced by its protagonist, moving sporadically and unexpectedly from scene to scene in a manic and seemingly post-traumatised manner, which I will go on to detail in the third chapter of the thesis where I analyse the temporal dislocations within the 88 novels.
The cremated body of 9/11 is carried through Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, where the motif suggests the frightening impermanence of the 9/11 body. Speaking to this status Yaeger notes, “this disaster [9/11] has left few objects and fewer bodies, but what is left trembles with instability” (191). In a demonstration of this problematic and irresolute aftermath in the novel, the protagonist of Falling Man Keith Neudecker stands at the site of Ground Zero: and look[s] into the haze, seeing the strands of bent filigree that were the last standing things, a skeletal remnant of the tower where he’d worked for ten years. The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river. They were settled in ash and drizzled on windows all along the streets, in his hair and on his clothes (25).
Just as the frightening fragments of bodies trouble the character of Remy in The Zero, Keith’s focus shifts between the bent wreckage of the buildings, the “last standing things”, and the intangible floating bodies. Here, the severe spatial and material rupture prompted by 9/11 is played out within the narrative as a troubled corporeality, and characters come to doubt their own place and permanence in the post-9/11 world. Crucially also, this fear draws on the deeply paradoxical status of the dust and debris itself. It is both “unworldly, unexpected, uncanny” in nature, and at the very same time, “strangely familiar” (Sturken, “Aesthetics of Absence”, 312), being comprised of paper, business cards and the mundane minutiae of quotidian office life.
In a disturbing and abject type of substitution through inhalation, DeLillo’s Falling Man explores the horror of bodies standing in the place of still-living bodies, which relates to primal terrors of disintegration and violation. The novel, the very title of which references the fall into abjection and instability heralded by the event of 9/11 itself, sees the male protagonist Keith Neudecker escape the collapse of the Towers, and go to hospital. Here a doctor tends to his wounds and makes particularly gruesome small-talk concerning suicide bombings and the abject, fragmented body. He says: “[i]n those places where it [suicide bombings] happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking 89
range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a café. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel.” He tweezered another splinter of glass out of Keith’s face. “This is something I don’t think you have,” he said (16).
In this description, the fear of substitution, of one’s body being taken over by and merging with another’s, combines with the abject body through the disturbing concept of “organic shrapnel”. In adhering to the Kristevan notion of being the “in-between, the ambiguous, [and] the composite” (4), this body occupies the paradoxical position of being neither dead nor alive; of being neither body nor debris. Again invoking the paradox of specificity and generality, the reference to “organic shrapnel” – of death infecting life – at once recalls the actual event of 9/11, but also smaller acts of terror, such as suicide bombings. In this way, the specificity of 9/11 is underlined, with the grisly and deeply visceral descriptions of 9/11 “splinters of glass” being removed from Keith’s face, but other traumascapes – “those places” – are evoked simultaneously. The fear of contagion demonstrated by the fact that a body can also become a weapon itself and target anyone “in striking range” underscores the ambivalent attitude towards the body within the novels, and also indirectly references the fact that some people who jumped from the Twin Towers actually killed bystanders on the ground with their fall.
Indeed, organic shrapnel, while a thematic focus of the novel, also permeates the entire narrative of Falling Man as a metaphor, as DeLillo continually returns to the idea of infection as a mode of connection: that pieces of one human’s life can infect another’s. In the novel, on the morning of 9/11, Keith finds a briefcase and seeks to return it to its female owner, with whom he embarks upon an illicit affair that punctuates the novel. This type of physical intimacy also verges on the abject. Here, it is as if the metaphorical organic shrapnel – what happens when one touches somebody else’s life? – becomes the narrative structural mode of the story itself. In this way, materiality is taken up as a narrative device, disseminating its fragmented status within the novels. It is the highly physical elements – the presence of Wendy’s mother in The Usual Rules, Walter’s “flour of the dead” in The Zero, and the illicit affair in Falling Man – which are symbols (and sometimes literal notions) of recuperating the lost other within narrative: of substituting the lost body with another object or 90 body.
Conversely, the inhalation of the lost body occurs as a generative account in Michael Cunningham’s trilogy Specimen Days. Here, the absorption of the lost body happens in a different, historical instance of trauma in New York City. The novel, comprised of three parts which are each set in various periods of New York’s history: the past, the event of 9/11 and the future, explores iterations of violence and turbulence which recur in the same part of Manhattan. In the first section of Specimen Days, set during the American industrial revolution, there is an immense conflagration in the “Mannahatta Company” in Lower Manhattan, very close to the site of present-day Ground Zero.
Early in the novel, the wreckage is cleared after the fire and the protagonist Lucas breathes in the air at the site, which “had a taste. Lucas rolled it in his mouth. He recognized it. The dead had entered the atmosphere… With every breath Lucas took the dead inside him. This was their bitter taste; this was how they lay – ashen and hot – on the tongue” (91). The way in which Lucas “took the dead inside him” can be read as the Christian allegory of Eucharistic communion and the specifically American secularisation of consumption as established by Walt Whitman in Song of Myself. The Whitmanian conception of imbibing the essence of the other is expressed by the famous line, “[e]very atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (Whitman, 50).97 This line recurs throughout the novel in an almost mantra-like fashion, explicitly countering or transferring the horror of the event so that it becomes incorporated into part of an American discourse and poetics. Crucially, the description of the fictional fire in 1800s New York resonates with a post-9/11 reader through proleptic irony: almost the same descriptions have been given about the acrid smell emanating from the site of Ground Zero. Here, the great fire of historical New York becomes a substitute trauma itself for the catastrophe of 9/11, and also, the lost bodies of that event become proxy
97 Toni Morrison also makes a reference to the “atoms” produced by 9/11 in her poem, and writes, “knowing all the time that I have nothing to say – no words stronger than the steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become”; Morrison, “The Dead of September 11”, Trauma at Home: After 9/11, Ed. Judith Greenberg, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 1. 91 bodies for the event of 9/11.
Through the use of allusions to Whitman, and specifically referencing the poem, Song of Myself, Specimen Days invokes a regenerative body that travels through each of the three stories. The character of Whitman is well suited to such a narrative function, as his own poetry is so steeped in notions of regeneration and consumption. In this poem, Whitman positions himself as an ethereal guardian and ends the poem with a pledge to his reader: I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles… / Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged / Missing me one place search another / I stop somewhere waiting for you (Whitman, 52).
Not only are notions of incorporation taken up within the subject material of Specimen Days, but also the fictional character of Whitman is used as a vehicle through which to demonstrate the unchangeable and regenerative nature of his characters. From this, we can infer that the bodily figure of Whitman recurs across the novel as a reminder of both the impermanence of the body – we will all die one day – and the power of a body to be immortalised in narrative.
A contrasting iteration of inhalation also occurs earlier in the novel, where Lucas must literally take the space of his dead brother, Simon. In the first story, ‘In The Machine’, Simon dies in an industrial accident, and Lucas must ‘become’ him; taking over his job and house. Again referencing Whitman: Lucas undressed and got into bed on Simon’s side. Simon’s pillows still smelled of Simon. Lucas inhaled. Here were Simon’s humors: oil and sweat. Here was his undercurrent of tallow and his other smell, which Lucas could think of only as Simon, a smell that resembled bread but not that, was merely the smell of Simon’s body as it moved and breathed (9).
Here, the religious allusion to bread references the idea of a Communion; that now Simon has died, Lucas can ‘imbibe’ him and take up his position in the world. The reference to taking over another’s body by inhaling their “humors” ties back into the post-9/11 references on the novel, and posits that such substitution can be a regenerative and productive process.
Many 9/11 novels, such as The Zero and Falling Man, both mirror the dissolution of the event and at times attempt to create at least a fictional 92 permanence from a precarious reality. Further, the type of narrative tone in these two novels, Falling Man and The Zero, also enables particular types of substitution to occur. In Falling Man, a serious narrative about the place of the individual in the aftermath of 9/11, the character of Keith is a survivor of the attacks, escaping the falling buildings with only minor injuries. Consequently, Keith’s proximity to the event defines the solemn tone of the narrative: Falling Man is not a comic narrative. Here, the threatened body which only just escapes the disaster allows for a serious set of contemplative substitutions to occur. Conversely, in The Zero, a satire of the 9/11 aftermath, Remy is not a survivor of the event; rather he was a police bystander. In Remy’s case, his removed proximity enables satire in the narrative: his physical, bodily distance from 9/11 allows for an ironic engagement with the event in narrative. These two different negotiations of the body in narrative return us to the development of the wish to substitute through one’s own body; to breathe in the lost bodies of 9/11. Such a wish prompts a strong connection between materiality and the event within the narratives of 9/11, demonstrating a macabre fascination with (and at times repulsion by) the real fragmented bodies of 9/11.
These acts of incorporation such as ingestion and substitution within the fiction demonstrate a refusal to let the body go. Indeed, the real attempts in the aftermath to absorb the event, such as taking souvenirs from the site of Ground Zero in the form of rubble or photographs, have been mirrored in the novels, which can be seen to re-embody, re-animate and substitute the losses from the event. Sociologist and visual cultures theorist Karen Engle goes as far to suggest that when observers took: home a piece [of Ground Zero] – the bits, remains, mors – of the trauma, [they]... incorporate[d] 11 September into their lives in classic melancholic fashion: they identif[ied] with the lost object (the towers, the victims, American innocence…) through a kind of ingestion (72).
Whether such an assertion is accurate, the perceived desire to ingest the event through taking pieces of Ground Zero from the site demonstrates a need to re- embody; that products which can be endlessly reproduced serve as a substitute, placatory narrative mechanism to deny the absent body.98 The
98 In reality, such a move also importantly allowed a funeral for the deceased to occur, as family members could bury a piece from the site; see, for example, Dean E. Murphy, “Slowly, 93 fictional process of making connections between the self and the site is one of the ways in which the absent body is re-animated in the novels. In any event, the quest for a piece of 9/11 suggests that the body holds the answer: that “those traces will tell the story of how someone died” (Sturken, Tourists of History, 183).
Taking up the notion of substitution through absorption more explicitly, the trope of communion or consumption also recurs across the novels and can be read as a wished-for resurrection of the body. Indeed, the various and diverse fictional attempts to integrate the lost body through communion or consumption endeavour to restore the body of 9/11, if only within the narrative. Jennifer Ash notes of transubstantiation that a: [l]onged-for union fusion could be achieved, quite literally, through the celebration of the Eucharist, the ingestion of the host, which was to incorporate the body of Christ in a fleshly and substantial way. To eat Christ was to ‘fuse’ with him physically and actually, was to re-create and re-experience the bodily pleasure(s) of the imaginary dyadic existence (97).
Following Ash, the imagined “ingestion” of the wounded or absent 9/11 bodies within fiction seeks to act as a substitute body and to re-create its existence. Such an ingestion also seeks to utilise Yaeger’s part-objects; the mors of bodies to recuperate the losses sustained. The ways in which the novels enact the wished-for resurrection of the body fits into the Freudian fort/da model of attempting to presage a return within the fiction. The deeply visual game of departure and return suggests the novels seek to construct a surrogate body; to stage a longed-for return.
This particular mode of fusion or incorporation is demonstrated in the novel Specimen Days. In the first part of the novel, the conceptualisation of individual dead bodies interrogates the idea of ingesting the lost other. When the character of Simon dies in the first story, ‘In the Machine’, the protagonist Lucas wonders about his admirer, Emily, who: ate Turkish delight privately, from a silver tin she kept hidden in her room. She would be eating it now, Lucas thought, over there, behind the curtain. What would heaven be for Emily, who loved candy and had hungered for Simon? Would there be a Simon she could eat? (9).
Families Accepting Ruins as Burial Ground.” New York Times 29 September 2001, Late (East Coast) ed.: B1. 94
Here, the metaphorical “hunger” for love is literally translated into a communion as the Turkish delight becomes conflated with the body of Lucas, and Emily similarly desires to absorb and imbibe her fantasy lover. This act of communion in which Emily participates can be read as a narrative attempt to compensate for Simon’s absence, and also, through the overt references to 9/11, the event itself. Such a move again follows Ash’s analysis of the transubstantiation doctrine where she writes, “to take communion was to participate in a communal, ritual feasting, was to eat God’s flesh and drink His blood” (81). Here, Ash points to the ways in which imbibing the essence of another moved into the domain of reality through the act of communion itself. She continues, “[t]he constituent elements of the Eucharist were metaphoric no longer; Christ’s body and blood was a real and actual presence in the bread and wine” (81).
Even through the very names of the characters, clear links are designated between the three stories, and each character seems to step out of their own time zone with their new embodiments, both devouring the other and being simultaneously devoured. For example, the first story reveals three characters named Catherine, Simon and Lucas. In the second, a woman named Cat has a son called Luke, and finally in the third section of the novel, ‘Like Beauty’, a man named Simon meets an alien called Catareen. These repeated substitutions – one body becomes another in each story – allows for a multiplicity of bodies to continually regenerate and transition within the novel through consumption and communion. The incorporation in Specimen Days focuses upon living characters literally imbibing the dead, either through ashes or symbols, thus consuming and devouring the collective body into that of the individual. This consumption and subsequent substitution can be read as a means of allowing the wounded or absent body to be re-animated and compensated for within the fiction. In this way, the material losses of 9/11 can be regenerated within the domain of the rhetorical.
Hysterical substitution The practice of substitution as regeneration also occurs through an hysterical absorption of the event into the self. Grounding my interpretation in Christopher Bollas’ theory of hysteria as a form of corporeal replacement, I contend that the 95 extreme identification with the absent bodies of 9/11 stems from a desire to reproduce the event through a character’s body within the fiction: to become the literal proxy or substitute for the absent or disintegrated body. The vehicle of hysteria has particularly relevant theoretical purchase concerning the event of 9/11, as it brings together both the body and trauma: as Jennifer Ash notes, “in hysteria it is the body which speaks, the body is used to encode, to articulate psychic pain, psychic suffering” (93). In this way, hysteria can combine the material and the abstract by its very definition: it is a psychic reaction to the real traumas manifested through the body itself. In this way, some characters in 9/11 novels seek to act as substitute bodies for those who have disappeared, as if their ingestion of the lost bodies could reanimate them.
In reality, hysterical reactions to 9/11 demonstrate the perceived absorption of the event into the body. The unusual, hysterical response illustrates the extent to which the absent body of 9/11 affected a small group of people in its proximity. In the aftermath of 9/11, five different adolescent girls living in New York City each suffered the same symptoms: extreme weight loss in a short period due to an inability to swallow. While such an example is in no way representative of the general reaction on the part of the public, it illustrates the complex relation, albeit at the limits, between the self and the event.99 As Judith Greenberg writes of the young women: [a]ll five believed that some debris or body part from the destruction of the towers had lodged in their throats and produced the symptom. Their identification with the scene of witnessing was so strong that it had “entered” their bodies. Upon examination, each girl indeed had a physical constriction in the throat, but there was nothing, no visible matter, inside to cause it (26).
This extreme identification with the disintegrated body played out through the girls’ inability to swallow, metaphorically signifies that the information – the attacks of 9/11 – was too difficult to ‘digest’. As Greenberg asks, “[w]hat lodges in our throats?” (26). Here, the event of 9/11 plays out and manifests in the very bodies of observers, seemingly standing in for and representing the vanished bodies of the event. Susan Faludi notes that these young women
99 Importantly, these hysterical examples do not detract from the real and long-term contamination from the event that has been well documented, and thought to be the cause of respiratory diseases and other illnesses, especially among New York firefighters. See Jennifer Senior, “Fallout: Is 9/11 to Blame for the Ailments of Cops, Firefighters, and Those Working and Living near Ground Zero?” New York 21 May 2005 and Anthony Depalma, “Tracing Lung Ailments That Rose with 9/11 Dust.” New York Times 13 May 2006, B5. 96
“seemed like an image that expressed our own inability as a culture to begin to talk about what happened or what [9/11] really means to us as a society” (Tomasky, para 7). One presumes that their identification with 9/11 was so extreme that they believed themselves to have ingested some fallout from the event.100 The inability on the part of these girls to articulate is mirrored by writers of the fiction, who also have trouble putting the event into words. Here, the novels manifest the speech and silence paradox through the hysterical body. Thus the real hysteria relating to the wish to create a substitute body or to enact the disaster within one’s own corporeal limits is demonstrated in the novels, illustrating the problematics of representation concerning the body itself.
Crucially for my discussion, when transposed into the fiction, this hysterical reaction demonstrates the desire for material losses to be compensated. Graphic novelist Art Spiegelman plays out this form of incorporating the body through extreme and self-conscious identification. In In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Spiegelman performs both the roles of victim and bystander, and confuses and conflates his own subjectivity within the broadsheets; the effect of which is to hysterically identify with the event itself. He notes of himself in the second person: [h]e keeps falling through the holes in his head, though he no longer knows which holes were made by Arab terrorists way back in 2001, and which ones were always there... He is haunted by images he didn't witness... images of people tumbling to the streets below... especially one man… who executed a graceful Olympic dive as his last living act (6).
Here Spiegelman translates the literal, external, fragile aesthetic of the post- 9/11 environment into an internal vulnerability: the “holes in his head” are not even expressed as “holes in my head” for the fear associated with such an admission of permeability appears even to preclude its ownership. Further, that Spiegelman metaphorically “falls” through these holes and voids while reflecting upon the images of those falling from the Twin Towers can be read as an act of conflating his own experience with that of the victims’: their
100 Jean Walton contends that the very processes of digestion and ingestion are coterminous with the control of the domestic space and the intrusion from the outside world. As such, the digestive tract itself can be conceptualised as a passage of the world, which brings the outside inside; Walton, “Female Peristalsis.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.2 (2002): 57-89. I am grateful to Elizabeth Wilson for referring me to Walton’s article, and for helpful discussion concerning hysteria in adolescent women. 97 corporeal devastation has become ingrained within his own mind, confirming the psychic fear of collapse and dissolution. Despite the fact that, as Versluys correctly notes, “fall[ing] through holes in one’s head is not the same as being forced to jump from 110 stories high [surrounded] by raging fire”, (“Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers: 9/11 and the Representation of Trauma”, 996) Spiegelman psychically connects the two events and positions himself as a victim of the event.
Such a fear is also demonstrated thematically and physically as Spiegelman’s work consists of separate broadsheets which, although related to each other, display no consistent linearity of narrative: they are shards of thought concerning 9/11 and each represents a different perspective and aspect of the event. Spiegelman’s hysterical absorption of 9/11 is one of the ways in which he comes to understand the event within his work, and the incorporation of the falling bodies into his own physical body adheres to the idea of the process of identification resurrecting the lost bodies of 9/11 within fiction.
This extreme form of substitution recalls Freud’s famous case study of the patient Dora in “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”. Here, Freud claims that extreme acts of incorporation through hysterical absorption occur, as the sufferer can “act all parts in a play single handed” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 149). In this way, this hysterical resurrection operates also as a demonstration of metonymy, as in hysteria, one can represent the “whole play” through the vehicle of one’s own body. As Naamah Akavia notes of Freud’s discussion of identification, it is a “highly important factor in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms” as will be shown, which enables patients “to express in their symptoms not only their own experiences but those of a large number of other people” (199). The event of 9/11 is literally embodied within those who observe the event, and these extreme acts of incorporation-through-absorption designate a desire to re-embody the losses of the event. Relating this back to the girls of which Greenberg writes, through the hysterical absorption they enact, they too can become part of 9/11 – a victim of sorts – by believing they ingested a piece of the event.
98
Such a hysterical absorption through substitution is also satirised within particular novels of 9/11. Taking up an ironic replacement or substitution, The Zero, offers a tragi-comic fetishised body. While Remy survives the attacks on 9/11, his son Edgar, despite knowing that Remy is alive and well, mourns his death. Edgar says to both of his parents: why is it so hard to believe that I could be grieving the same thing as those other children? I suppose you’d rather I behave like everyone else and grieve generally. Well I'm sorry. I’m not built that way. General grief is a lie… I have chosen to focus my grief on one individual. On the death of my father… and you know frankly, I guess I expected a little more support from you (34).
Despite “general grief” being a lie, Edgar embraces the specificity of his father’s death – another lie – and even tells his classmates about his father’s act of bravery on the day of 9/11. Walter’s ironic take on the dead father both satirises those who choose to “grieve generally” and further offers a critique of so doing. Remy’s son Edgar chooses to become a substitute grieving body. While a reader recognises the absurdity of Edgar’s decision, they are also called upon to re-assess their own “general grief” concerning their own engagement with the event of 9/11: by virtue of reading a novel on the 9/11 aftermath, are they too inhabiting substitute grieving bodies? Indeed, later in the novel, Remy confronts his son Edgar about this, yet Edgar still chooses to believe Remy is dead, despite his obvious presence. Edgar says, “I’ve made so much progress… I’ve been through all the stages of grief. You can’t want me to go back. What, to denial? Or… or anger?... Not now. Not after I’ve finally accepted your death” (279). Here, Walter’s satiric use of the quasi-absent body speaks to a counter-narrative of the absurd incorporation of the body into narrative. Hysterical identification within the fiction of 9/11 then, seeks to bring out the return of the lost or wounded body and to restore it within the body of the character. In the case of satirical substitution, of course, such a restoration is rendered explicitly useless.
Historical Replacement The reciprocal play between the event and the fiction continues in the final demonstration of substitution identified here, which occurs through historical replacement. Characters grapple with the lost bodies of 9/11 by turning to past iterations of the wounded body, as if to supplant their absence. Such a desire is well exemplified in Jay McInerney’s novel The Good Life. Here the 99 protagonist Luke struggles with what he perceives as the city of New York’s inability to incorporate the dead bodies of 9/11. While walking near the graveyard of Trinity Church, Corrine says to Luke, “I just realized there aren’t really any graveyards in Manhattan… [in] Père-Lachaise in Paris… the Parisians walk and picnic among their illustrious dead. We don’t have the space or the time for the dead”. (155) Of course, after 9/11, there is a new graveyard in Manhattan: the small necropolis of Ground Zero. In this scene, McInerney points to the clear trepidation concerning having “space and time for the dead”: whether the dead body can take up a legitimate place within the frenetic pace of New York City. But later, Luke tells Corrine: [t]he town I grew up in… was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Thousands died in the course of a few hours. My great-great- grandmother’s house was a field hospital and she had hundreds of wounded under her roof that night… Nearly fifteen hundred soldiers are buried in what used to be the family cemetery (214).
The reference here to the “thousands [who] died in the course of a few hours” is especially resonant concerning the attacks of 9/11: it is as if Luke has made a subconscious conflation of the two tragedies. But further, the idea of having “wounded under her roof” and so many soldiers “buried in what used to be the family cemetery” offers Luke a degree of solace; as if the incorporation of the dead body into the sphere of the living has occurred before within his family, so can now reoccur at this tragic time.
Such a sense of national history as national remembrance in terms of the body of America pervades the novel. To fully comprehend the corporeal losses in New York City, the characters must turn to another place – this time to Tennessee – to fathom that this type of devastation has occurred before, and been assimilated into other places, times and memories. Corrine asks, “[d]on’t you think that changed her?” (214) and Luke tells her that his great-great- grandmother “wrote a letter to the mothers of every single one of them” (214), which appears to demonstrate acts of grieving and also of recovery; of coming to terms with the event itself. Thus, the idea of the dead body or the living “making way” for the dead in his hometown Tennessee, or successfully being incorporated into the city, is what helps Luke come to terms with the new graveyard of Manhattan. Accordingly, the substitute historical body stands in for the missing body of 9/11. 100
Manifold dead bodies have also been substituted through the literature of 9/11 through an acknowledgement that the city of New York itself is a space of older, dead bodies. Despite Corrine’s statement that New York doesn’t have “the space or time for its dead”, New York City already incorporates physical dead bodies within its boundaries. The small graveyards at Trinity Church and St Paul’s Chapel are two examples of marked cemeteries in Lower Manhattan, within one city block of the site of Ground Zero. Further, there are multiple unmarked gravesites, too. In relatively recent history in 1991, a burial ground of over four hundred African slaves was uncovered in present-day Lower Manhattan near Broadway. New York’s first African-American Mayor David Dinkins said in a speech, “[t]wo centuries ago, not only could African- Americans not hope to govern New York City, they could not hope to be buried within its boundaries” (Cantwell and diZerega Wall, 282). This discovery reveals the status of New York as encompassing a continuum of tragedy and bodily catastrophe: that it is in fact the home of a self-perpetrated somatic disaster as opposed to one inflicted by the terrorist other offers a sombre and reflexive comprehension of the place of the dead body within the walls of the city.
The lost bodies in the novels of 9/11 propel characters to search and move across a horizontal plain; searching for meaning in light of their absence. Such a mode of writing appears to be endlessly generative, yet conceals an inability to find closure, or in fact, to recover the elusive lost body. These fictional, lost bodies of 9/11 cannot be restored, yet paradoxically are required in order to authorise and substantiate narratives of the event. The various iterations of the lost bodies demonstrate also the wide-ranging functions with the textual body can perform: it can be utilised as a vehicle to repudiate, to concede, to deny and to accept the losses of 9/11. In a seemingly contradictory manner, the texts of 9/11 vacillate between these functions, often utilising more than one in a complex response to the immensity of the trauma.
My reading of the variously narrated body of 9/11 suggests its manifold and diverse iterations all relate back to the wish to substitute the real bodies of the 101 event. Such a substitution can be both negative and positive: it can both help and hinder the grieving process and elicits a range of emotional responses from the novels. In my argument, I mapped conflicting textual functions and interrogated the productive relationship between them in order to establish both the desire to substitute and the implications of so doing. I argued that the absent and fragmented body is critical and indeed central to the analysis of the event, and that further, that such a body constantly, and sometimes compulsively, moves between these three ideas. Using this model, I argue that various substitutes offered by the novels performed different, and often conflicting functions through which the paradox of absence and presence is illuminated. This focus on the paradox of absence and presence and the idea of retrieving a body in literature leads me to an examination of urban space in the narratives of 9/11 that will be the subject of my second chapter.
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Chapter Two Urban Space and 9/11
“To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance”. – Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall, (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988), 92.
A range of spatial crises and contradictions from the real event of 9/11 dictate distinct patterns of urban engagement in the novels, both in terms of narrative and figuration. My argument will take up the connections between space and the individual in the urban landscape of New York City made overt by de Certeau, and analyse the ways the novels of 9/11 each reconstitute a particular and substitute version of the event and a corresponding fictional city. Indeed, as a point of contrast, de Certeau’s famous text on the World Trade Center gazes on the city from a point of height and authority: the “elevation” of such a critical position offers perceived command and control. Post-9/11 and with the demise of the Twin Towers, novelists necessarily write from a new position; a 103
Ground Zero in theoretical terms, with little “distance” from the event. Moreover, the substitute cities that they create are rendered complex by the various contradictions and paradoxes101 within this reconstructed imaginary, for example the recurring wish for the return of the Twin Towers, alongside the desire to commemorate their absence. Indeed, the diverse iterations of urban trauma played out across the novels inscribe recurring ideas, such as the focus on historical sites of urban tragedy and the desire to rebuild the city.
In my argument, I provide a survey and analysis of the range of different points of connection and severance between the city, the psyche and the community that are created when the event of 9/11 is reconstructed within fiction. In light of the two paradoxes of universality and specificity and absence and presence, I will examine the interrelations and dislocations of space and time and how they relate to the operations of mourning and rebuilding in the novels. By mapping these interrelations, my primary argument is that the novels of 9/11 seek to offer a substitute city in the cultural imaginary for the losses sustained. First, I analyse the historical versions of the city constructed within the novels, and argue that these cities can be read as specific political and aesthetic projects in light of 9/11. I then move to the domain of space and the psyche, and suggest that the literal destruction and excavations of the real event affects the psychic scaffolding of the characters across the novels. The final move I chart is an analysis of movements in space, and how characters come to epistemological enlightenment by traversing the city after 9/11.
These three components of my argument provide links between the individual, the city and the psyche, and produce a framework whereby the material and the psychic can enjoin. Consequently, understanding the site of Ground Zero and the event of 9/11 as extensive spatial dilemmas within literature speaks to both material and abstract concerns about 9/11 and the reconstruction of New York City. In making these claims, I recognise the long-held American tradition
101 In fact, paradox and urban space are both deeply rooted in the very act of 9/11 itself. Bill Brown points out the morbid irony that one of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, was “a professional city planner [who was] writing his master’s thesis... on the preservation of the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo”; Brown, “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory).” PMLA 120.3 (2005): 735. Here, one of the 9/11 perpetrators literally embodies the desire to preserve one city, yet has been made infamous by attempting to destroy another. 104 of conceptualising a relationship between the psyche and the environment, demonstrated by diverse authors ranging from Henry D. Thoreau,102 to Walt Whitman103 and to postmodern novelist Paul Auster.104 My argument acknowledges these various literary conventions and posits that in light of these, 9/11 literature poses particular challenges to the narrativisation of the city. In particular, it requires our familiarity with the relations between space and an individual character or community that emanate from Romantic epistemology. In light of these traditions and the “Tribute in Light” memorial, the novels of 9/11 grapple with the domains of the symbolic and the real, and present narratives that are deeply embedded in the city and in the mind itself.105 Therefore, many of the characters participate in a range of relations with the psychic, urban space of New York City, such as personification, metonymy and pathetic fallacy. Crucially, these relations adhere to a paradoxical engagement: they are constantly moving between the poles of absence and presence, in particular, creating fictional substitute cities in the process.
The altered, ruptured landscape of New York City has been reworked and reinvested through the literature of 9/11 in order to create a generative literary landscape through which characters can come to their own understanding of the trauma, themselves, and their city. Despite the real city of New York accepting only self-perpetrated change, the fictional New York City is steeped in the tradition of rewriting itself, as its very foundations are built upon successive writings and rewritings.106 Further, positioning the city as a place of
102 Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 text, Walden, details the ways in which country life can simplify the mind; Thoreau, Walden, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). 103 Walt Whitman’s poetry explores the interplay between self and environment. See especially Whitman, Leaves of Grass, (New York: Viking Press, 1982). 104 New York novelist Paul Auster examines the complex relationships between characters and their respective postmodern cities. See, for example, Auster, The New York Trilogy, (London: Faber and Faber, 1987) and Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). 105 Architectural journalist Robert Bevan notes of the symbolic power of the towers, “[i]t is hard to imagine the leveling of any low-rise building, unless it were a magnificent and resonant historic monument, having the same impact”; The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 65-66. Similarly, urban planning theorists Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella claim that terrorists target buildings based upon their particular “symbolic resonance”; Vale and Campanella, The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8. 106 For example, in Paul Auster’s canonical 1987 short story ‘City of Glass’ – the first in the trio comprising The New York Trilogy – Peter Stillman literally walks the city, spelling out the letters of “the Tower of Babel”. Here, language and rebuilding is directly linked to the city, as Stillman 105 urban regeneration allows for a re-imagining of the landscape, whereby the city can be couched as a healing space through its literal and figurative rebuilding. For all the reiterations and repetitions of trauma within the novels, by their end, the space of Ground Zero is couched as a place of redemption, renewal and regeneration. The problematisation of this gaping hole in the middle of Lower Manhattan – spatially, commercially, metonymically – can be reworked within literature, almost as if to ‘work through’ the dilemma itself. In this way, the city acts as a conduit and living metaphor for recovery within the novels, providing a new avenue into reading such a specific post-9/11 aspiration.
Indeed, the vast and empty spatiality of Ground Zero has, in many ways, become a monument or counter-monument107 itself; standing defiantly as the simultaneous symbol for what was once there and for what is no more. Historian Karen Remmler notes, “[s]ites of memory are often meant to commemorate the dead, even as they stand as a point of reference for the living” (54), and this recalls the paradox of absence and presence invoked by the “Tribute in Light” memorial. Marianne Hirsch interrogates such a question in the aftermath and asks, “[w]hat will the icons be for September 11? What elements determine this process of reduction and iconization?” (12). With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the icons for September 11 have indeed become the Twin Towers and Ground Zero, and that the “iconization” of which Hirsch writes is the result of the towers and the space of Ground Zero having since been taken up so intensely in literature and film108 in particular.
In order to provide a sustained cultural and theoretical analysis of the spatial exchange between the literature of 9/11 and the event itself, I will deploy a model that brings together two key theoretical positions in order to understand the urban space of the novels. Here I draw on theorist Charles Taylor and historian Maria Tumarkin to illuminate the peculiar dynamics that emerge
physically and psychically turns the literal streets of New York into his own alphabet: spelling out the Biblical location of the first dissemination of language. 107 James E. Young coined this term in relation to the paradoxical import and status of Holocaust memorials in Germany. For an insightful discussion on counter-monuments see; Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today.” Critical Inquiry 18.2 (1992): 267-296. 108 See, for example, The 25th Hour (dir. Lee, 2002), The World Trade Center (dir. Stone, 2006) and United 93 (dir. Greengrass, 2006). 106 between urban space and characters in the literature of 9/11. First, I utilise Taylor’s conception of a modern social imaginary, which refers not to a set of ideas, but rather to the ways “people imagine their social existence... and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (2). This idea opens up the city as an imagined construct and reminds us of de Certeau’s literal labyrinthine streets, yet also offers a psychic dimension that takes into account a character’s interaction with the urban space.
Crucially, Taylor’s modern social imaginary allows for an expansive connection between the space of Ground Zero to New York City to the United States: it permits us to move from the specific to the universal, and indeed, back again. This is especially productive in relation to negotiating the paradoxical relations and tensions between specificity and universality that reach across the novels. In fact, to conceptualise New York City as a modern social imaginary requires us to understand the city both as a collection and exchange of memes and norms, and further, as a model of collective space as understood by Taylor’s notion of “metatopical” spaces. Taylor interrogates the relationship between the individual and the collective in the urban landscape,109 and writes, for instance, we lob a stone at the soldiers before the cameras of CNN, knowing that this act will resonate throughout the world. The meaning of our participation in the event is shaped by the whole vast dispersed audience we share it with (169).
The “participation in the event” using Taylor’s conception of urban spaces points to the specific modern model of the city whereby people felt strings of connection to 9/11 across the United States and the world: a “metatopical” relation. Here, the resonances of such a destructive event reverberate far beyond the borders of the event itself. In these ways, Taylor’s conception of the modern social imaginary enables a pathway through which we can read the collective city against the imagined psychic space in the novels. It follows that this aspect of my theoretical model also allows for a reading of an individualised, character’s “participation”, to use Taylor’s term, in the event of 9/11 and the space of New York City.
109 Benedict Anderson makes productive connections between the individual, community and space. See Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, (London, New York: Verso, 1991). 107
These co-ordinates of metatopical space are focused in specific terms by Maria Tumarkin’s conception of a traumascape. Tumarkin, who writes on tragedy and its effects on space, monuments and individuals,110 uses the concept of a traumascape to describe the physical place where tragedy once occurred. In her book, Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy, Tumarkin writes: [b]ecause trauma is contained not in an event… but in the way this event is experienced, traumascapes become much more than physical settings of tragedies: they emerge as spaces, where events are experienced and re-experienced across time (Traumascapes, 12).
By applying Tumarkin’s historical and anthropological lens to the novels of 9/11, I argue that the ways in which a traumascape can “evoke other places – other islands, ruins, besieged cities and buildings torn from the ground” (Traumascapes, 14) offers an imaginative avenue for the literature of 9/11 to form connections between New York City and other traumatised spaces. This model reaches across forms of sympathy and similarity, and permits us to draw horizontal connections between the site of Ground Zero to other tragedies and historical adversaries. Applying Tumarkin’s analysis to Ground Zero, we can see it has become a traumascape through the ways in which it has become imbued in the cultural consciousness,111 and memorialised in the form of viewing platforms and visible memorial structures at the site.
This chapter will apply the historical and anthropological lens of the traumascape to the novels of 9/11 and demonstrate that traumascapes not only offer ways for writers to make sense of the new post-9/11 world, but, and even counterintuitively, they also help transcend its very limitations. In fact, the frame of a traumascape can move the event beyond its spatial and temporal
110 Maria Tumarkin also offers an examination of personal resilience and audacity, especially after tragedy, in Tumarkin, Courage: Guts, Grit, Spine, Heart, Balls, Verve, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007). 111 Even in the process of naming the World Trade Center site as “Ground Zero”, comparative literature theorist Richard Stamelman notes that the term itself designates unimaginable destruction through its overt links to “those wastelands of total ruination that newsreels and photographs of Hiroshima... have embedded in our visual memories... “Ground zero,” therefore, installs Hiroshima (and other nuclear sites) in the heart of Lower Manhattan”; Stamelman, "September 11: Between Memory and History." Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 13. Further, and following nomenclature that designates a traumascape, David Simpson notes that the phrase ‘sacred ground’ which is used to describe Ground Zero was “coined at Gettysburg”; Simpson, “The Mourning Paper.” London Review of Books 26.10 (2004). 108 location which offers the imaginative opportunity for the novels to “experience and re-experience” the virtual space of Ground Zero. As the traumascape is also symbolically representative of that which is elsewhere; it draws lines of meaning between and beyond other sites of temporal and spatial catastrophe that are similarly imbued. The effect of such a drawing together of disparate disasters allows writers to allude to previous tragedies in order to explain the event of 9/11. My reading of the novels of 9/11 demonstrates that the fictional space of Ground Zero operates as a palimpsestic place of trauma, as other tragedies can be projected into its boundaries. So, working within the paradox of universality and specificity outlined at the outset of this chapter, the traumascape can reinforce and insist upon specificity – this is the site of 9/11 – but it can also operate as a universalising category – this is the site of generalised trauma. This chapter examines the flows and ruptures between these two understandings and affects.
Overlaying Taylor’s modern social imaginary with Tumarkin’s traumascape makes productive and overt connections between the two domains of psychic trauma and the spatial city, and offer a comprehensive framework through which to link the two. This model encapsulates the oscillations across the range of novels as they move between spatial and psychic spaces after 9/11, and will facilitate the mapping of the diverse movements in these spaces, especially in light of the paradox of absence and presence.
The first city I will analyse is the historical city and its relationship to 9/11 in the novels. Here I take up Tumarkin’s traumascape, and suggest that the site of Ground Zero in particular is reinscribed within the novels in ways both reflexive and paradoxical. Contrasting the post-9/11 city with the pre-9/11, although in altogether different modes are Michael Cunningham’s trilogy Specimen Days, Patrick McGrath’s serious trilogy Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (2005), the social satire The Good Life (2006), by Jay McInerney, and Jess Walter’s comic The Zero (2006). These novels, the only 9/11 novels which elect this historical method, insist upon the specificity of 9/11, but also posit its constant repetition in history. McGrath’s novel explores three different moments in the history of New York, including the immediate aftermath of 9/11, 109 while McInerney focuses on the much more recent history of modern day New York City both immediately before and after the attacks. The narrative of Jess Walter’s The Zero moves between moments in the protagonist Remy’s own history, and to sites such as Gettysburg in order to come to terms with the event. These three novels are deeply concerned with placing the event of 9/11 on a continuum of historical violence, and as such, locating the city as a space of regeneration and renewal, yet they diverge in their radically different temporal settings, character motivations and narrative modes.
My analysis of the historical city leads us to turn to the mind, and I take up the psychic spaces across a range of the novels. I will analyse the play of city with individual, and using the slippage between the two in the texts – both thematically and semantically – discover the psychoanalytical implications of such a conflation or at times, a separation. In so doing, I examine first the psychic connections made between ground and stability, especially in Jess Walter’s The Zero, and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). In these novels, the third-person disjointed and non-linear narratives of two confused men – Brian Remy and Keith Neudecker respectively – emanate directly from the event itself. In the aftermath, both men find themselves profoundly disjointed and disconnected from those around them and indeed, sometimes from themselves. Here, I offer a psychoanalytic reading of these troubled protagonists in a destroyed city, which illuminates the links between self, trauma and urban spaces, and I use Taylor’s modern social imaginary to conceptualise and trace these links. From here, I examine the various spatial dislocations experienced by various characters, which combine the urban space of the city and their psychic interiority, and specifically investigate the idea of image and text. I begin with the recurring reversion to childhood in the novels and examine Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Joyce Maynard’s The Usual Rules (2003) and argue that the use of a child narrator to tell the story of 9/11 emphasises the fractured subjectivity in the novels, and complicates the relations between the characters and their cities. Further, I argue that the novels also focus on the rebuilding of the city, and this correlates with (and at some points, mirrors) psychic dissolution and recovery. Faced with the startling rupture in the city, characters 110 across the range of 9/11 novels seek to rebuild the urban landscape figuratively. Using the fictional space of Ground Zero as a literary traumascape, in Tumarkin’s terms, I trace the wish to rebuild throughout the novels, which recalls the “Tribute in Light” memorial. In Jess Walter’s The Zero, Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now and Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, the ruined city of New York is remade as a place of knowledge and experience, where characters can come to a greater cognition and appreciation of their own place within the city. Here, both the respective protagonists of Remy and Luke seek out the site of Ground Zero as a place of redemption, and desire to start again, as if psychically mirroring the real attempts to rebuild the site.
Finally, I argue that the protagonists must physically interact with the city in order to come to knowledge, and I examine the various narrative movements across urban spaces in the novels. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Pattern Recognition (2003), the city is utilised as a place of healing for their respective protagonists Oskar Schell and Cayce Pollard. Here, both characters must physically engage with the city, one by walking through the streets of New York, and the other avoiding it entirely by flying to other cities, in order to discover the mystery that surrounds the death of their respective fathers. It is only through the very acts of travel and movement within and outside the city that both can find the solution to their fathers’ passing and finally begin to grieve. Here, the acts of movement through the city both create and reinforce relationships between the individual and the broader urban landscape.
The Historical City: Temporalities of Space and Retrospection History is a crucial component of the fictionalised cities of New York that are reconstructed in 9/11 novels, and I begin the first part of my argument by looking to older versions of urban space and its narrativisation. As if to prefigure the event of 9/11, the use of historical analepsis in the novels reconstructs Ground Zero as a space of recurring violence and trauma, connecting the event of 9/11 with different sites of catastrophe. Such a palimpsestic process can be read through Tumarkin’s conceptualisation of a traumascape, which interrogates the investment of traumatic meaning 111 projected onto an urban space or structure. Indeed, situating New York City, and in particular Ground Zero, as a traumascape figuratively recasts and rebuilds the city wherein the trauma of the event can be experienced and then replayed through the novels. Therefore and in order to examine urban, literary examples of the traumascape that are reconstituted within the fiction, I will analyse the historical trilogies of Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now – part of the Bloomsbury series entitled ‘The Writer and the City’ – and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days and Jess Walter’s ironic novel The Zero. These three, highly disparate texts offer a range of different historical reconstructions and engagements with their respective urban spaces. Importantly, these fictionalised versions of urban space move between insisting on the specificity and uniqueness of 9/11, and accepting the event as another iteration of historical violence within New York City.
At the outset, Specimen Days and Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now share important and revealing similarities: both are historical trilogies, their very composition invoking the passing of time with the conventional past, present and future structure. However, embedded in this structure, both novels express radically different conceptions of history and attitudes towards the event of 9/11, and construct opposing projects that underscore deeply ambivalent attitudes towards the city itself. In Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, the three sections of the novel document fictional lives in New York City against real events at different points in its chronological history. The novel can be read as a study of nationalism and its changing nature and values over history, as it charts historical iterations of the American desire for supremacy and power. The first section of the novel, entitled ‘The Year of the Gibbet’, is set in the 1830s but incorporates flashbacks to the period preceding the American Revolution in the late 1700s. The tone of this section of the novel is fiercely patriotic and nationalistic, as the native New Yorkers – first clandestinely and then openly – plot against the British soldiers’ occupation. The second section of the novel, entitled ‘Julius’ takes place in the capitalist 1800s and the third and final part of the trilogy contains the event of 9/11.
By placing 9/11 as the endpoint of the novel, the text suggests that despite its 112 ability to endure past catastrophe and immense metamorphosis, there is no future for the city after 9/11. Indeed, the ways in which the novel sketches the city of New York, and particularly, the space of Ground Zero as a traumascape, creating a layered effect of trauma within the city. In this way, events of the past such as the Great Fire – so steeped in the city of New York – become retrospectively inscribed and imbued with the event of 9/11. As contemporary literature theorist Daniel Lea notes that reading 9/11 in Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now is “always about reading backwards through the history of American self-formation and self-empowerment” (“Haunted Memories: Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town and 9/11’s Precursors”, 2).112 The aftermath of 9/11 is evoked through both the intensely nationalistic tone, and also the ominous threat of ‘the other’; themes to which McGrath returns in each of the three sections of the novel.
Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now contains conflations and parallels of the old New York City with the new, which operate to suggest an alternative reading of 9/11: that it may, in fact, be another repetition of violence and not anomalous. At the very beginning of the novel, the historical traumascape is established with the protagonist, Edmund, noting that cholera is spreading through the city. Edmund writes in his journal: I have been in the town, a disquieting experience, for New York has become a place not so much of death as of the terror of death. Many houses are deserted and from those which are not drift the fumes of preparations intended to protect the still living within (1).
Although this portrayal evokes a New York of the 1830s, a post-9/11 New York is also referred to with the purposeful use of the word “terror”, and the comparison of the dead and the “still living”: a particularly resonant dichotomy in the aftermath of 9/11. Further, the very location of this story is almost at the exact site as the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. In fact, McGrath situates the story geographically such that a contemporary reader familiar with the geography of New York City would understand its present-day location and proximity to Ground Zero: “[o]ur house was on the west side of the town, on Lambert Street, behind the old Trinity Church - in the very shadow of Trinity”
112 For an extensive analysis of “American self-formation” in the context of early New York City, see Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, (New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995). 113
(3). The “old Trinity Church” of which McGrath writes is two blocks south of Ground Zero, and was badly damaged in the fallout of the 9/11 attacks. This reference recalls the palimpsestic layering of past iterations of tragedy when the real ashes of the Twin Towers settled on the gravestones of old New York at both the cemeteries of St Paul’s Chapel and Trinity Church during 9/11.
In another connection between 9/11 and historical acts of violence in New York City, the text chronicles a devastating fire started by one of the revolutionaries, the description of which bears remarkable similarity to those of the 9/11 attacks: [a]ll was heat and smoke…When I turned I saw that the Trinity was blazing like a fired ship, ghostly black ribs of beam and rafter for a second visible within the flames before being engulfed once more. Then with a great crash the roof fell in and moments later the steeple came down after it in a fountain of fire (13-14).
The “heat and smoke” and the “fountain of fire” directly correlate to descriptions of the lattice-like walls of the Twin Towers that remained after their collapse, and certainly, the “steeple” of the church connects to the 80 foot spire-like antenna atop Tower 1 (the North Tower). The “ghostly black ribs of beam and rafter” speak to an embodied sense of New York, as if it is a living, breathing organism, and further, directs the reader to the myriad ghostings within the material of the novel. Such a scene encapsulates the ways in which the three stories constantly echo back and forth between each other and the present-day trauma of 9/11. Crucially, the novel’s political project suggests an indictment on the current era: he replaces the World Trade Center in this historical version of New York City with a church, and the change of an icon of capitalism to one of religiosity signifies a deep mistrust or foreshadowing of the contemporary age. While these textual conflations speak on the one hand of an attempt to incorporate 9/11 into the historical landscape of violence, they also suggest an inability to see past it: the novel literally ends in the aftermath of 9/11 without any sense of resolution. In the third and final part of the novel, the event of 9/11 is fictionalised and the protagonist is in therapy, unable to recover from the event and unable to move forward.
Not only is the traumascape of Ground Zero invoked and alluded to in a retelling of a past history of New York in the novel, the site itself is also taken 114 up directly in the final part of the trilogy, entitled ‘Ground Zero’. The descriptions after the fire reference the process of clearing the Ground Zero site, and relatives’ attempts to recover bodily remains of their loved ones with, “[f]amilies [who] knelt in prayer, [while] others stood in silent shock or picked among the ashes attempting to recover what was left of their property [and] bodies burned almost beyond recognition [that] haunted... dreams for many months after” (McGrath, 15). The final section of Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now entitled “Ground Zero” is set in the direct aftermath of 9/11. Here, the protagonist walks to the World Trade Center site, and acknowledges the ravaged buildings after the attack. He says: I saw in the glare of the floodlights fretted sections of the tower thrusting up from mountainous piles of smoking rubble, skewed from the true like tombstones in the nearby graveyard of Trinity Church. These monumental shards of the towers' aluminum-faced columns with their slender gothic arches were all that remained standing, and I felt as though I were gazing at the wreckage of some vast modernist cathedral (195).
This parallel between Trinity Church and the Twin Towers set up in ‘The Year of the Gibbet’ is continued in the ways in which both are described in their ruined state. Further, the wreckage of the Twin Towers is explicitly named as a “vast modernist cathedral”, working again to conflate the two proximate structures within the text. While the conflation of the Twin Towers and a church in the first section novel suggested an indictment of contemporary United States culture, this conflation seems to elevate the Twin Towers to a holy and sacred structure; as if once having experienced their absence, they could be reified (and even deified) once more within the novel.
In Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, previous sites of tragedy in New York are layered with the future resonances of Ground Zero, and consequently, work further to inject and invest the present site of Ground Zero with repetitions of past suffering and physical damage. These connections produce a literary traumascape which troubles the claims to specificity about 9/11. Therefore, the fictional attempt to draw parallels between 9/11 and other historical events simultaneously reinforces its trauma, and undermines its uniqueness. Further, the connections between the American Revolution and 9/11 in the novel render problematic the idea of the foreign adversary, and indeed, the notion of a terrorist: it was the Americans who sabotaged and 115 subsequently fought off the British in Lower Manhattan.
While Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now concentrates on two stages in New York’s history and culminates with a post-9/11 story, the other historical trilogy among the novels of 9/11, Specimen Days, begins with the industrial revolution, then moves to a post-9/11 era, and finally ends with a futuristic tale of aliens living on earth. Comparing the ways in which 9/11 is located in these two texts reveals the contrasting projects of the two novels respectively. While Ghost Town attempts to offer an explanation of 9/11 an focuses on the question of nationalism, the very structure of the novel – with 9/11 as the final part of the trilogy – suggests that the event itself is the endpoint: that narrating the city after its occurrence is impossible. Conversely, the last part of Specimen Days is futuristic and outside the bounds of realism, which I argue suggests that 9/11 can be seen on a fantastical continuum, instead of as the limit.
While Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now centres on communities – Taylor’s “modern social imaginaries” – in mourning and buildings in past and present-day New York City, the novel Specimen Days focuses on the individual stories involved in traumatic events across the centuries, invoking particular traumascapes in so doing. In the first section of the novel, a literary traumascape is invoked with a factory fire, fictionalised with a peculiar 9/11 prolepsis. Early in the novel, a woman is depicted in the window of a burning building: [t]he square of brilliant orange made of her a blue silhouette, fragile and precise. She was like a goddess of the fire, come to her platform to tell those who gathered below what the fire meant, what it wanted of them. From so far away, her face was indistinct. She turned her head to look back into the room, as if someone had called to her. She was radiant and terrifying. She listened to something the fire told her. She jumped (89).
Here, an event from the past is referenced using distinctly 9/11 language: her “silhouette” and “indistinct” face echo those who fell from the towers, as does the explicit reference to jumping off the burning building. Post-9/11, such a description evokes the event by recalling another tragedy, and creates a dialectic between the absent and the present. The dramatic irony inherent in such a staging after 9/11 imbues the historical story with a powerful present- 116 day parallel. Daniel Lea notes of this link that it works to “suggest New York’s status somewhere between the material and the immaterial, between a solid coherence and the mythic construct forged in its own self-imagining” (2). Here, the use of Ground Zero as a traumascape within fiction – a place that transcends space and time through trauma – creates an imaginative continuum of violence, connecting the past with the present. In this way, both Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now and Specimen Days situate 9/11 as a continuation of past violence and trauma by incorporating its occurrence within a historical, even if fictional, narrative. Consequently, then, the fictionalised city of New York is resuscitated in order to narrativise the event of 9/11.
The function of this literary traumascape, connecting 9/11 with other traumas in history, is also importantly paradoxical. As Lea again notes, the texts reinforce “that the history of New York is one of recurrent territorial violence [and that]… the damage inflicted on 9/11 is only the latest spilling from a recurrent wound” (2). Such a staging of 9/11 on the one hand functions to read the event as a repetition of territorial violence; as a globalised and historicised occurrence: it is only another iteration of historical trauma. But on the other, the two novels also insist upon the unique and idiosyncratic nature of 9/11: this is unlike anything we have ever seen. Such a narrative ambivalence underlines the problematics of narrativisation, and reminds us of the universality and specificity paradox in the novels of 9/11.
While Specimen Days posits that 9/11 is a significant catastrophe, it also offers a future, albeit a deeply foreign and extraordinary one containing alien beings. On the other hand, Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, suggests the failure of language after 9/11 by its own inability to narrate the future. Both novels, then, suggest that the future (of New York, and at times, the United States) is in jeopardy, yet both make such a claim for different reasons. Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now presents as a critique of nationalism and by looking at past narratives of invasion and terrorism, charts a retrospective path to 9/11. By contrast, Specimen Days insists upon a future, and the regeneration of New York, but concedes that this is only possible in 117 another genre, and presents us with an apocalyptic and science fiction version of the future, where aliens and robots inhabit the city.
While a traumascape can connect one site to other locations of tragedy, it also maintains the ability to memorialise a tragic event, causing spatial disruptions within the narrative. In Jess Walter’s The Zero, the protagonist Remy discovers that the only way he can understand 9/11 is through the history of the city. In a state of shock after 9/11, Remy struggles to conceive and delimit the site of Ground Zero, as so much of the ground was excavated and relocated in the aftermath. Through Tumarkin’s lens, it is as if the disruption of the traumascape adversely affects Remy’s own wellbeing. He finds it difficult to know how to conceptualise the location that paradoxically may no longer be the very site of 9/11. Remy reflects: [t]he ground is where history lay. They didn’t put the Gettysburg memorial somewhere else. They put it at Gettysburg, or some version of that place, of that ground. They were the same: ground and place – plowed and scraped and rearranged, sure, but still you knew that in this place the soil was tamped with bone and gristle and bravery. That was important. The ground was important, imprinted with every footfall of our lives... the full measure and memento of every unremarkable event, and every inconceivable moment. Remy turned from side to side, taking the whole thing in, feeling incomplete, cheated in some way, as if they’d taken away his memory along with the dirt and debris. Maybe his mind was a hole like this – the evidence and reason scraped away. If you can’t trust the ground beneath your feet, what can you trust? If you take away the very ground, what could possibly be left? (307).
This description, recalling de Certeau’s exploration of space and place, where he suggests a place “implies an indication of stability” (117), highlights the crucial relationship between the event of 9/11, character and urban space: it is its very location that prompts a literary revisiting of the dilemma. For Remy, the tragedy of the event is indelibly caught up with the land itself, as “ground and place” become one and the same. In this way, Remy’s presence acts as an historical reminder that suggests a different interplay with history than in Ghost Town or Specimen Days, which both recall specific instances of New York catastrophe.
Importantly, the reference to Gettysburg also upholds and continues the pull of the traumascape: while Remy is mourning for the dirt of Ground Zero, he follows psychic threads and moves to another moment of trauma in American 118 history. Indeed, on the first anniversary of 9/11, the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg chose to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence”, 314), again reinforcing Tumarkin’s conception of a traumascape; importing the resonances of one historical sacred space to a contemporary one. Such a move in the novels returns us to the paradox of the specific yet generalised nature of the trauma of 9/11: the novel insists upon the distinctive character of the event and simultaneously suggests through the historical city that it is only another repetition of violence.
The historical city can be read as a way of presaging the trauma of 9/11, seeking to prefigure it within fictional cities past. On the other hand, the fictional historical cities can also offer a figurative space in the novels within which to come to terms with the event itself. The oscillation between the two inconsistent poles of specificity and universality further gestures to the manifold difficulties of speech after national trauma, and highlights the ways in which the spatial trauma of 9/11 prompted a return to the history of New York City in the novels. This retrospective imperative, as demonstrated by the preoccupation with the historical city in the novels leads me to discuss the ways in which the psychic, spatial trauma is played out in the novels, as an introspection; a move inwards.
Psyche in the City: The Psychic Implications of Space in 9/11 Novels One of the primary ways in which the spatial crisis has been taken up in the novels of 9/11 has been through the imbrication of space and psyche.113 Drawing a line between the psyche and the cityscape in his article entitled, “The Manhattan Skyline's 'Phantom Limb'”, journalist Peter Marks writes after 9/11, “[i]t is as if the city, in the myriad individual responses to the alteration of its appearance, is struggling collectively with how to treat its psychic wound, how to gaze anew at a landscape that doesn't quite look like itself” (A1).114
113 Connections between the city and the psyche are a commonplace of the historical account of New York’s architecture. Visionary architect Hugh Ferriss explains that “[a]rchitecture influences the lives of human beings”; Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, (Princeton; New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1986), ii and Ann Douglas also notes “[b]uildings, in other words, affect our unconscious and quite possibly emanate from it”; Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, (New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995), 438. 114 The contemporary and historical worship of skyscrapers in New York City has been well 119
Here, Marks connects the literal hole of Ground Zero with the psychic wounds that extend and reverberate far further than the geographical boundaries of the cataclysm. Marks’ article, published in the month after the attacks, situates the trauma of 9/11 as being deeply ingrained within the psyche of the city; that Ground Zero represents the physical and the psychic wound simultaneously.115 These links between psyche and city are clearly evident in the fiction of 9/11 in the way that the characters of 9/11 novels play out various types of psychic dissolution that mirrors the fall of the Twin Towers. There has been much scholarship on the parallels between the mind and buildings,116 and using these productive connections between urban space and psyche, I will map the range of fictional prototypes of this relationship. I begin by analysing the overdetermined trope of ground and digging within the texts and reveal the deep psychic ruptures caused by the torn city of New York. I move to the problematics of the image of the Twin Towers falling and how this affects the psychic state of various characters. This leads me to an examination of the tendency to revert to childhood in the face of such spatial crisis. I will end my discussion on the psyche with the trope of rebuilding and regeneration that recurs across the novels.
Ground Zero: Earth, Grounding and the Fall Characters in the novels of 9/11 share a set of spatial dilemmas of the real event of 9/11, including spatial disorientation, fragmentation and a deep fear of voids. In this way, the characters who embody or deny the voids and gaps of 9/11 mirror the spatial catastrophe of the event itself. I will analyse the characters who literally embody the urban, material devastation of the event documented by historians and journalists. See, for example, Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, (New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995), Josef Astor, “Skyscraper Couture.” Vanity Fair July 1996: 90-96, 140 and Paul Goldberger, “Building Plans: What the World Trade Center Meant.” The New Yorker (2001): 76. 115 Historian Ann Douglas analyses the early development of New York and notes that even in the early 1920s, “Manhattan was engaged in revolutionizing its architectural identity, and shifts in architecture always spell shifts in the psyche of the people who build it”; Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, (New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995), 437. 116 For example, Carl Jung wrote extensively on the parallels between the house of his dream and his mind; see Jung, Man and His Symbols, (London: Arkana, 1990), 54-56. Gaston Bachelard also explored the psychic dimensions of the house; Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Trans. Maria Jolas. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 3-37. For a more contemporary analysis of the internal spaces of homes and the mind, see Clare Cooper Marcus, House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home, (Berkeley: Conari Press, 1995). 120 and who become disjointed in different ways. Recalling Tumarkin’s traumascape, which connects us with tragedies in other locations, the fact that the ground at Ground Zero was excavated and carried away left many characters unable to connect with the tragedy at all, feeling displaced from the locus of catastrophe. When we speak colloquially of feeling ‘grounded’, we assume a connection between ground and mind; a relation between stability of the earth and of the psyche. Indeed, literary theorist Richard Gray notes that the event of 9/11 and its aftermath are “part of the soil, the deep structure lying beneath and shaping the literature of the American nation, not least because they have reshaped our consciousness” (129). Such a statement, linking the very ground of New York City with the mind, points to the interconnection of the destruction of the Twin Towers with the stability of the protagonists. For just as the traumascape operates to reinvest the site of Ground Zero as a site of recurring violence within the novels, it also opens up a reading which can explain the psychic predicament of their characters. Such a reflexive reading allows for city, character and psyche to be analysed not as separate entities, but rather as three mutually coextensive and supportive domains.
In Falling Man (2007), we can examine the connections between psyche, language and space, which when taken together, suggest a broader and pervasive sense of disorientation after 9/11. The gaps of the event – the lost bodies, the lost Twin Towers – are mirrored by various fractured and fragmented characters, many of whom have psychic states which emulate the ruptured urban environment of the 9/11 aftermath. In the novel, the female protagonist Lianne teaches writing classes to senior citizens who have early stage Alzheimer’s disease, all of whom “wanted to write about the planes” (31). Lianne feels overwhelmed at the thought of Alzheimer’s disease: it scared her, the first signs of halting response, the losses and failings, the grim prefigurings that issued now and then from a mind beginning to slide away from the adhesive friction that makes an individual possible. It was in the language, the inverted letters, the lost word at the end of a struggling sentence. It was in the handwriting that might melt into runoff (30).
Much as the discussion of Alzheimer’s disease in the novel symbolises Lianne’s own fear concerning the loss of language after 9/11, it also speaks directly to spatiality and dissolution: it is as if Lianne is worried that the “losses and failings” of the Twin Towers may translate to her own interior and that she 121 too may absorb the mors of the event. Lianne encourages her class to write on the topic of 9/11, but is afraid when they begin to lose the language to speak of the event. This loss, albeit at the extreme, can even be read as a nod to DeLillo’s own hesitations about writing on 9/11: Falling Man took six years, one of the longer time periods, to be published. Lianne’s job as a writing teacher then, is symbolic of the ways in which one needs to re-learn how to write in the aftermath.
The spectrum of psychic operations expressed in the novel also draws together the domains of memory and identity with space and psyche. In the process of learning to write again, these senior citizens begin to lose their memory. In this way, the outward, external fragmentation of bodies and buildings threatens to impose on the character’s own psychic scaffolding. One of Lianne’s Alzheimer’s patients, Rosellen, is declining rapidly and beginning to suffer from a form of dementia. Rosellen realises: an elemental fear out of deepest childhood. She could not remember where she lived… The world was receding, the simplest recognitions. She began to lose her sense of clarity, of distinctness. She was not lost so much as falling, growing fainter. Nothing lay around her but silence and distance (93-94).
While Lianne is afraid of these losses, it is the character of Rosellen who seems to have symbolically embodied her broken environment. In particular, the references in this description to falling, and to the “elemental fear out of deepest childhood” allude directly to 9/11, and combine to resemble Lianne’s terror of uprootedness and forgetfulness after the spatial ruptures of the event itself. The allusions to “silence and distance” further refer to the role of temporality in forgetting, aging and the inability to recognise the urban landscape after trauma. Even more overtly, the character of Curtis struggles with his memory loss, and brings together space, time and the fractured body in so doing: Curtis B. could not find his wristwatch. When he found it, finally, in the medicine cabinet, he could not seem to attach it to his wrist. There it was, the watch. He said this gravely. There it was, in my right hand. But the right hand could not seem to find its way to the left wrist. There was a spatial void, or a visual gap, the connection, hand to wrist, pointed end of wristband into buckle. To Curtis this was a moral flaw, a sin of self-betrayal (95).
The “spatial void or a visual gap” concerning Curtis’ watch alludes to the event of 9/11, where the city seemingly committed an act of self-betrayal. Instead, 122 what remains in the aftermath are two immense spatial voids and visual gaps where the towers used to stand. It is almost as if Curtis is reflected the absences left by the attacks of 9/11 through his very body; mirroring the forever changed urban landscape. Here, the very notion of ‘aftermath’ refers to the urban cityscape of New York and to Curtis’ mind after the onslaught of dementia, thus linking the internal and external psychic and spatial ruptures. Further, the notion that the “right hand could not seem to find its way to the left wrist” suggests the continuing irreconcilability of the two competing and contradictory wishes of remembering and forgetting, which push up against each other in the relation to 9/11 both in the novel, and also in the real aftermath of the event, returning us to the paradox of speech and silence.
While figurative voids recur in the novels, so too do literal, urban voids, which disturb the characters’ psychic state. In Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, the protagonist Luke must engage and participate with the frightening voids at Ground Zero. Here, the post-traumatised character of Luke literally interacts with the broken cityscape, and recalls his time volunteering to uncover survivors in the debris of the Twin Towers: [w]e'd find voids, these holes under the debris. That was what you hoped for, what we were all looking for. Voids, pockets of space and air where someone might have survived. That was the worst part for me, when I was at the front of the line - groping into those empty spaces. I felt like a coward; all I could think about was reaching into a void and having a hand grab me. It just seemed terrifying, those holes - like being a kid afraid of the dark spaces under the bed. Here I am, supposedly rescuing people, and I'm afraid even to reach inside. Those voids are like portals to the underworld” (253). In this description, the absences that proliferate in the post-9/11 city are excavated and mirrored in Luke’s mind, as he explains his fear of the foreign voids. Indeed, the phrase, “portals to the underworld” invokes a space of death as opposed to miraculous survival, and highlights the manner in which spatial voids are couched and constructed within 9/11 novels: as negative and fearful spaces. But also, the paradox of absence and presence recurs, with the juxtaposition of being afraid of a “hand grabbing me” while purporting to be on a rescue mission. Just as Lianne fears losing her memory and the clarity within her own mind, the character of Luke becomes afraid of the external, urban spaces. In this way, the fractured characters of 9/11 novels can both dread their external surrounds imposing on their minds, and also become fearful of 123 their minds mixing with or mirroring their spatial environment.
Complicating such a dichotomy is the narrator of Oskar in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, who can be read as a direct representation of problematised spatiality within the text. In the novel, Oskar is conflated with spaces of nothingness or emptiness, and comes to symbolise himself a space of dislocation. In the novel, the precocious nine-year-old Oskar has specific difficulties with space after his father’s death in 9/11. Oskar’s account of his fear is particularly disturbing, as it gestures towards that which even his precocity cannot comprehend. In other words, Oskar knows he doesn’t know, and says: Even after a year, I still had an extremely difficult time doing certain things, like taking showers, for some reason, and getting into elevators, obviously… A lot of the time I’d get that feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space, but not in a fascinating way (36).
Here, Oskar correctly recognises his own manifestations of trauma: “getting into elevators, obviously” directly identifies his fear associated with the event of 9/11. But, problematised spaces are also exemplified through the halfway places in which Oskar sees himself or dreads. The “huge black ocean” or “deep space” of which Oskar speaks represents the literal unresolvable voids and absences that frighten him. While Oskar’s voids are not literal, urban ones, like Luke must confront in The Good Life, his voids exist in his mind, as psychic gaps emanating from the event. Further, Oskar’s seemingly contradictory impulses of experiencing claustrophobia in the small, confined space of a shower as opposed to an agoraphobia of sorts concerning the ocean or space are linked through the fear of not being able to breathe in either scenario. Such a terror obviously relates to Oskar’s intense fears of dying, and to the dislocation of space, effected by the event of 9/11.
This type of construction of the effects of space on the psyche links back to Rosellen and Curtis B. in Falling Man, in that both share similar, perceived collapses of their environment, but Oskar differs in that his fears transcend the reality. While Oskar dreads real spaces such as showers and elevators, these come to represent a feeling of a “huge black ocean or in deep space”: spaces which are outside of the city and unanchored in New York. For Oskar, who 124 makes meaning out of his urban environment, the trauma of 9/11 fractures his sense of self and reconstructs a fictional aftermath whereby the protagonist is disjointed and moved outside of the space of the city. These novels bring into focus the complex modes through which spatial dilemmas are made manifest, while they maintain a constant connection between the psychic and the physical, material city.
In The Zero, the gaps or voids exist as existential and philosophical gaps, and the idea of the number ‘zero’ signifies the ultimate spatial absence or rupture. In a description early in the novel, Remy contemplates: the huge four-faced clock tower loomed like a dragon. He thought of the watch face. No zero on a clock. Around and around. No rest. No balance. No starting place. Just on to the next number. The sky was clearing, cold, the clouds opening between the brownstones. He stood on the sidewalk and looked back at the city, the burnt tip of the island and the bright hole in the sky (96-97).
Here, the event of 9/11, the “bright hole in the sky”, is conflated with open space and the notion of ‘zero’, which is one he can only conceptualise in terms of ‘The Zero’: a moniker given to Ground Zero by the rescue workers at the scene. Later in the novel, this same thought recurs for Remy while talking to a terrorist police-informer, named Jaguar. In this description from the novel, instead of the idea of zero being couched as an all-pervasive and horrifying absence, it is conversely constructed as a generative and abundant notion. While standing looking at the wreckage of Ground Zero with Remy, Jaguar moves from the abstract to the material and explains: [i]t’s an Arab word…Zero. From the word, sifr. Means empty, like cipher. The world had no concept of zero, of nothingness, until we brought it west. Of course, we stole it from the Hindus. But it had never occurred in the West that there could be a number before one… They couldn’t even get their minds around the concept of emptiness, of infinity, the circle completing itself. If you can’t count nothing, you can’t conceive of everything. Without zero, you can’t comprehend negative numbers. So you can’t see infinity. There’s no sense to the universe. No negative to balance the positive, no axis on which to turn, no evil to balance the good. Without zero, every system eventually breaks down (310).
The obvious irony of “zero” being a specifically Arab legacy reinforces the sense of psychic distress: the Arabs have both given orientation - “without zero, every system eventually breaks down” – and disorientation, in the form of the lost Twin Towers. Further in this description, the idea of zero is translated from the spatial void of Ground Zero to a more philosophical plane: “if you can’t 125 count nothing, you can’t conceive of everything”. Such a conception of zero as a productive, generative one works to help Remy on his way to mourn the event itself, and to conceive of the spatial absence of Ground Zero as more than just a space of absence in the narrative. In this way, the voids of the event are presented as dualistic constructions. At once they reflects the spatial devastation of the ruptured, post-9/11 city and at other times, the fragmented mind of the protagonist. Further, the focus on ‘zero’ recalls the paradox of absence and presence, too: the fact that characters need to conceive of “nothing” in order to understand “everything” returns us to the “Tribute in Light” memorial, underlining the recurring wish to create narratives – to offer something in the place of nothing – in the aftermath.
Image vs. Text: The Mediated City My exploration of the complex conceptual space leads us to examine virtual space and reproductions in relation to the novels of 9/11. The ways in which characters of 9/11 novels interact with the mediate city of New York recall the problematics and tensions between image and text. For some characters in the novels of 9/11, the city itself (and more properly, the site of Ground Zero) becomes too overwhelming, and instead the event is mediated through screens. Such a narrativisation evokes the ways in which most readers would have experienced the event of 9/11, and again brings us back to the paradox of speech and silence: how can authors offer narrative for some of the most powerful images ever viewed? In order to substantiate this analysis of these characters and their interaction with the city through screens, I will examine three novels which are deeply embedded in the city: William Gibson’s futuristic Pattern Recognition, Don DeLillo’s melancholy Falling Man and Jess Walter’s comic novel The Zero. These texts demonstrate the complexities of narrativising the city, the ways in which characters grieve, and the paradoxes of image and text. This narrativisation can also be read through Taylor’s modern social imaginary, which takes into account how an event is “participated” with through various media.
Complex sites of trauma – Tumarkin’s traumascapes – are re-written and reconstructed within the fiction, forcing characters (and crucially, readers) to re- 126 view the event of 9/11. In Pattern Recognition, Cayce watches a live broadcast of the event of 9/11 on television, she experiences a disconnection between her self and the fall of the towers. Here, Cayce sees on television: the impact of the second plane. And looks up, to the window that frames the towers. And what she will retain is that the exploding fuel burns with a tinge of green that she will never hear or see described. Cayce…will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it. It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture (137).
This reflection unites both Cayce’s personal memory and narrative of 9/11 with a broader social memory, for Gibson recounts an individual’s reaction to a broadcast directed at a much wider audience. As such, it also constitutes a moment of a collective act of memory – one which readers can remember themselves – that the novel reenacts and fictionalises, with an overt blurring concerning the boundaries of fact and fiction; “it will be like watching one of her own dreams on television”. Thus the site of Ground Zero becomes reconstructed and reinscribed with new meanings within the fiction. But this description also concedes the difficulty for fiction to encapsulate the event: the idea that Cayce “will have no memory of it” speaks to the inability or at least performed inability of fiction to represent the event. In this way, the mediated image through the screen stands in as a substitute or surrogate experience of the event, holding the place of the real.
In Falling Man, the surrogate, screened experience of 9/11 also occurs for Lianne, who mourns the event of 9/11 by re-watching the footage of the attacks on the towers. The third person narrative explains: [e]very time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s into some other distance, out beyond the towers (134).
Here, Lianne’s personal narrative of almost losing her husband in the attacks merges with the collective screened television narrative. Even at the level of the sentence, Lianne’s re-watching of the tape with her finger on the power button speaks to the real and the virtual processes of 9/11 and memory intertwined, as she attempts to re-live 9/11 through film and somehow regain 127 control over the event. This reflexive process is also an overt reference to the reader, who themselves re-experiences the event through their reading of the novel; seeking similar meaning or control as Lianne does. Much like Cayce’s “experience outside of culture”, Lianne’s first intuitive experience is to turn the footage off, yet she continues to observe the event being replayed. This surrogate mediation of 9/11 gestures to the diverse difficulties of representation, and the novels’ reliance on screens demonstrates the inability for some characters to come face to face with the devastation of the city.
Mediated, surrogate experiences of the city can be performed within the body of the character, too. In Walter’s The Zero, the ruination of the towers is conflated with the destruction of Remy’s eyes in a move that brings together the self and urban catastrophe. Here, the protagonist Remy believes the footage of 9/11 acts as a spectre for everything else he sees afterwards; in this way, becoming a virtual and persistent mediated experience that refuses to be relegated to the past and is instead an ever-insistent present. The notion of having a spectral trauma is also particularly relevant to Remy, as he is going blind progressively, and sees disturbing images of the degeneration of his eyes. At the beginning of the novel, Remy: felt a jolt of déjà vu, anticipating each mute image before it appeared, and it occurred to him that the news had become the wallpaper in his mind now, the endless loop playing in his head – banking wings, blooms of flame, white plumes becoming black and then gray, endless gray, geysers of gray, dust- covered gray stragglers with gray hands covering gray mouths running from gray shore-break, and the birds, white – endless breeds and flocks of memos and menus and correspondence fluttering silently and then disappearing in the ashen darkness. Brian Remy closed his eyes then and saw what he always saw: shreds of tissue, threads of detachment and degeneration, silent fireworks, the lining of his eyes splintering and sparking and flaking into the soup behind his eyes – flashers and floaters that danced like scraps of paper blown into the world (8-9).
The telling idea of the images of 9/11 as the “wallpaper in his mind” backgrounding every new image he is to see, demonstrates the insistent, substitute version of the event at work within the fiction. Further, the “endless loop playing in his head” is a direct reference to Remy’s incorporation of the spatial rupture, as if the destruction of his eyes mirrors the material void created by the towers: both of which he can see as if in moves of déjà vu. The powerful spatial catastrophes of 9/11 affect the character’s psyche in ways that 128 reveal the tensions between image and text. Cayce, Lianne and Remy all interact with the physical spaces of Ground Zero through screens – either televised or Remy’s damaged eyes – and such screens represent the inability to address (and the paradoxical compulsion to confront) the tragedy itself. Such conflicting desires speak to the manifold psychic engagements with urban space in the novels, and reveal the ways in which one affects the other.
Childhood and Space: The Reversion to a Pre-9/11 City The mediation of the city through images also occurs through specific narratological choices. My reading of the child narrator in the novels of 9/11 brings together the ideas of undoing the damage of 9/11 and urban space as healing. I argue that the prevalence of child narrators underscores the psychic dilemmas of narrativising 9/11, as writers revert to childhood in order to come to understand the new city of New York. Further, the mediation of the event through the eyes of the child is far away from de Certeau’s comprehensive, omniscient vision of the city from on high: the child must literally look up while traversing the city, as she attempts to decode the seemingly impossible dilemmas of space after 9/11. Acknowledging the different fractures associated with 9/11, architect and filmmaker Gustavo Bonevardi, one of the designers of the “Tribute in Light” memorial for the Twin Towers, wrote: [t]he day of Sept. 11 thrust me back into childhood... I was seeing the world again as a child. The events were so big as to be beyond my comprehension. My grown-up frame of reference was useless to me... my first reaction was juvenile: I wanted everything to be OK, I wanted the Twin Towers back, and I wanted it all, now (para 1).
Bonevardi’s reversion to more “juvenile” reactions, such as feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the event, and the wish to undo the damages incurred speaks to one of the primary difficulties of trauma: it can complicate time, as I will go on to examine in the third chapter of this thesis. Such reactions also emphasise the failure of language in the aftermath as Bonevardi is unable to find a vocabulary with which to describe this new condition and instead insists his own frame of reference is “useless”. Such a description returns us to Charles Taylor’s conception of the social imaginary, where the profound wreckage of the city perpetrated by the event of 9/11 ruptured society’s pre-9/11 sense of security and within the novels, prompts a thematic focus on childhood. Taylor notes that when the safety of the social imaginary is 129 breached, “we can react with great insecurity” (182). One of the primary ways in which such an insecurity is narrativised is through the voice of a child. In this context, the child narrator offers a fitting vehicle through which to explore the difficulty of language mediating loss and the problematics of articulating spatial absence in the novels.
In the novels of 9/11, the child narrator symbolises both the difficulties of speech and the child-like desire for the return of the Towers. In Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the unreliable first person narration of the character of nine-year-old Oskar is in mourning for his father. Unable to accept his father’s death in 9/11 – no body was ever recovered – Oskar walks the city, bereft and lonely. He visits his father’s gravesite to look inside his coffin: this is the only way he can gain a form of psychic understanding concerning his father’s absence. Oskar says: I opened the coffin. I was surprised again, although again I shouldn’t have been. I was surprised that Dad wasn’t there. In my brain I knew he wouldn’t be, obviously, but I guess my heart believed something else. Or maybe I was surprised by how incredibly empty it was. I felt like I was looking into the dictionary definition of emptiness (321).
The play between heart and mind represented in this illustration acts as an analogy for how adults perceived the urban, spatial ruptures of 9/11 in the aftermath: at once a rational comprehension of the event, coupled with a child- like sense of implausibility, effectively portrayed here through the voice of the child narrator. Further, Oskar’s claim to ‘define’ spatial emptiness or absence through such an experience engages with the distinct difficulties of categorising and naming loss itself.
The palimpsestic allusions to post-catastrophe novels – and other post- catastrophe child narrators – in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close renders complex the fictional representation of the city of New York in relation to the contested claim of 9/11’s universality and specificity. The character of Oskar Schell himself can be read as an overt allusion to the child protagonist Oskar Matzerath in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1961), set in the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden in World War II, a city devastated by acts of urban destruction. Oskar Schell’s precocity and impossibility echoes Grass’s child protagonist, Oskar Matzerath, who mourns the death of his parents too, and 130 actually refuses to grow up from the age of three. In this way, positioning the young innocent figure within the traumatised urban cityscape offers a conception of the attempts to articulate the loss of 9/11 within literature. Both Oskars compulsively wear the same clothing: Matzerath “declared, resolved, and determined [to] stop right there, remain as I was, stay the same size, cling to the same attire” (Grass, 60) and Oskar Schell only wears white (Foer, 3). Even more overtly, Oskar Schell has a tambourine that he beats when anxious and which accompanies him on his extensive journeying. Oskar says, “I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me to remember that even though I was going through different neighbourhoods, I was still me” (88). This obvious eccentricity carries strong resonances of Grass’s The Tin Drum, where the identically named Oskar carries with him a tin drum upon which he beats incessantly and compulsively as a reaction to the trauma of World War II and to the loss of his parents.117
The allusion to another post-catastrophe novel is invoked as a reminder of Oskar’s response to the loss of his father in traumatic circumstances. In The Tin Drum, Oskar Matzerath says, “I tucked my very umbilical drum under my sweater and concentrated on my own troubles” (122-123). The idea of an “umbilical” drum or tambourine in Oskar Schell’s case denotes a merging of the outside world with the inside – a cord along which the external world of the city is brought inside to the psyche. This explicit reference directs the reader to urban post-traumatised behaviour, layering Oskar’s literal journey with its psychic counterpart. Crucially, we can also read the connection as invoking the paradox of universality and specificity: the direct allusion can work both to augment and universalise the sense of 9/11 trauma by placing it on the same level as, for example, post-war Germany, but it can also undermine the very specificity of the event that the novel insists upon.
117 Laura Frost also notes the allusion to Grass’s “wilfully stunted boy hero”; Frost, “Still Life: 9/11's Falling Bodies.” Literature after 9/11, Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 185. Critic Michiko Kakutani further notes the allusion to The Tin Drum, as well as suggesting further allusions to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye with the morose boy wandering the city and Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) who also writes letters to people he doesn’t know; Kakutani, “A Boy's Epic Quest, Borough by Borough.” Book Review. The New York Times 22 March 2005, Late (East Coast) ed.: E1. 131
Noting the child narrator peculiar to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, critic Walter Kirn writes that Foer’s novel is a “conscious homage to the Gotham wise-child genre” and that this format “evokes, at a primal cultural level, the benevolent, innocent New York that was vaporized, even as a fantasy, when the towers were toppled” (1). In particular, Foer explicitly references The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and The New York Trilogy (1987), drawing on well- trod conventions of the genres of the youth-in-the-city, and the hard-boiled detective respectively, with which Oskar must participate and conform in order to learn more about his missing father.
Also using the figure of the child protagonist to engage with the urban destruction of 9/11, Joyce Maynard explores a young family coming to terms with their mother’s death in The Usual Rules. Here, the innocence of the pre- 9/11 city is linked with the youngest child, Louie. The following imagined dialogue between the protagonist Wendy and her young brother Louie demonstrates the seeming incomprehensibility of sudden loss: If not today, then soon, she would take him where the towers used to be, as close as the policeman would let them get. Is this where Mama is? He might ask her. This is where she used to be… The men are clearing everything up now, aren’t they? Yes Louie, she’d say. After a while, all this mess will be gone. But Mama’s building isn’t there anymore. No Louie. Or Mama either (381).
For just as Oskar seeks to use his experience to ‘define’ absence – endowing loss with meaning – so too must Wendy correct Louie’s language of loss: “Is this where Mama is?” “This is where she used to be”. In a telling move, the child of Louie is only, even in Wendy’s imagination, able to come to terms with his mother’s death with a direct visit to the site of Ground Zero itself. During this visit, he doesn’t ask about her identity or subjectivity, but rather her location. This suggests that Louis’s perception of the loss is a spatial one within his psyche: Louie’s loss of innocence is directly paralleled with that of the city. Further, the ways in which the language operates in this description suggest the paradoxes of and interrelationships between space, grieving and memory. When Wendy speaks of visiting Ground Zero and getting “as close as the policemen would let them get”, it is as if she is speaking not only to the 132 practical realities of the restricted areas at the site, but also to the inability to ever get “close” to her mother again, or to accept her passing. The uncertainty that pervades this portrayal in terms of the temporal markers: “if not today, then soon” and “after a while” also suggests both Wendy’s loss of innocence and her difficulties grounding the spaceless event – “this is where she used to be” – in time.
In many ways, the spatial devastation of Ground Zero evoked in the novels becomes degree zero of language; where each character must learn to speak and write again, as if in the body of a child. Authors who consciously adopt the figure of the child narrator do so knowing the conventions upon which they draw in relation to the loss of innocence. However further to this conscious move, there appears to be an unconscious evocation of the writer’s self through the child: that as if after the event of 9/11, one of the only ways to express what one felt about the event was to evoke a grand temporal shift and to revert to the voice of a child. Paradoxically, of course, by adopting the child narrator figure, novelists such as Maynard and Foer reinforce and underline their adult, post-innocence position.
The Psychic Desire to Rebuild Much as fictional effects can mirror their city’s deterioration, they can also reflect a wish to rebuild the fictional city. The very idea of rebuilding within a narrative elicits notions of reworking or re-imprinting the original; of making way for a new, substitute city through a partial or whole effacement of an earlier one. Indeed, the process of rebuilding is particularly pertinent to novels based in New York City: the ever-changing metropolis encapsulates a strange contradiction in that it is a fixed entity defined by the processes of self- perpetrated change.118 Therefore, the contested task of reconstruction at Ground Zero is directly taken up in a figurative move within the novels, as the spatial rupture of the city is played out as a literal representation of the injured
118 Stephanie Li notes of Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts (2004) that Whitehead uses 9/11 to “propose that loss has always been a constitutive aspect of the city and that the attacks have not fundamentally altered its relationship to individual inhabitants”; Li, ““Sometimes Things Disappear”: Absence and Mutability in Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York”, Literature after 9/11, Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 83. 133 self. In his book 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, David Simpson underlines Taylor’s argument about community and notes that the very process of rebuilding at the World Trade Center site “seems to… be implicated in our own state of metaphysical and political health” (56).119 In this way, Simpson makes clear the relationship between the physical efforts to rebuild at the site and the metaphysical or psychic implications that follow. In fact, As Steven Jay Schneider writes, [i]n one sense, the twin towers have already been rebuilt as communal, if only virtual, objects of sentiment, signaling America's former confidence and self- assurance while at the same time metonymically connoting the scores of innocent people whose lives were lost on September 11 (35).
For a city so steeped in cultural mythology and resonance, the paradox of New York is that it is deeply susceptible to transformation and metamorphosis. In his book A History of New York, historian François Weil writes that the city is, “[a]n immense palimpsest, [it] is always rewriting itself, risking the loss of its past meanings” (xiv).120 The fact that the city is in a constant state of reinvention and self-manipulation can also mean that New York can more easily build new meanings that have greater resonance and impact due to the immediate appropriation of the event. These possibilities lead me to identify and examine the ways in which the city of New York has been rebuilt and reconstructed in the literature of 9/11.
Jess Walter’s black comedy, The Zero, draws on ideas of rebuiding and urban resilience and takes up the idea of the changeability of New York City. In the novel, such a theme is played out through the minor character of Gerald Addich. The protagonist, Remy, finds Addich’s diary in the rubble, and returns it to him after 9/11. In this meeting and as though speaking as the literal embodiment of New York, the character of Addich says of his city: [w]hen I saw those lunatics in the Middle East on TV… jumping up and down celebrating because some nut jobs had murdered three thousand people, you
119 Josef Astor also notes the correlation between the psyche and skyscrapers; Astor, “Skyscraper Couture.” Vanity Fair July 1996: 90-96, 140. For more on such correlations see, Neil Leach, “9/11.” Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, Ed. Mark Crinson. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 169-191. 120 Michel de Certeau also notes, New York’s “present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read it in a universe that is constantly exploding”; De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. Steven Rendall, (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1988), 91. 134
know what I thought?… I thought, Fuck you. We used to kill that many ourselves in a good year. This city, it doesn’t care about you. Or me. Or them… This city cares about garbage pickup. And trains. That’s the secret… what the crazy assholes will never get. You can’t tear this place apart. Not this city. We’ve been doing it ourselves for three hundred years. The goddamn thing always grows back (303).
This expression of New York City as a ravaging and revengeful personification of an entity that “always grows back” references the changeability and palimpsestic nature of the city, but also reinforces its perceived infallibility; that even with immense destruction over three hundred years, “you can’t tear this place apart”.121 The overt anger in tone and language in this description demonstrates the highly emotional engagement with the process itself. Such a fictional move that seeks retrospectively to imbue the city with strong and intense resilience functions as a mode of rewriting the city in the aftermath. Of course, such a figurative rebuilding contains ambiguities regarding rebuilding. In order to conceptualise his beloved city as a regenerative and powerful entity, he must concede that his city “doesn’t care” about its inhabitants. In this way, much of the literature accordingly moves between the poles of determined reconstruction and melancholy resignation concerning the post-9/11 city. Therefore the interplay between the city and the literal process of rewriting or reconceptualising the city within literature post-9/11 offers a different space for identity formation within the novels themselves.122 The city of New York with the ruptured space of Ground Zero within its boundaries may now suggest a new space for theorising the self within the city, and further, the implications for rewriting within this new terrain are productive and generative.
The implications for rebuilding, then, attest to a type of aftermath literature written through the city; to use Charles Taylor’s term, literature “imagined” through the city. Taylor claims that the events that hold our imaginings are:
121 Echoing a very similar sentiment in relation to the resilience of New York City is Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland (2008). There, the protagonist Hans notes that the word ‘aftermath’ “refers literally to a second mowing of grass in the same season. You might say, if you’re the type prone to general observations, that New York City insists on memory’s repetitive mower – on the sort of purposeful post-mortem that has the effect, so one is told and forlornly hopes, of cutting the grassy past to manageable proportions. For it keeps growing back, of course”; O’Neill, Netherland, (London: Harper Collins, 2008), 2. 122 For further discussion on identity within the urban landscape over time, see David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002) and Eric Lipton and James Glanz, City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center, (New York: Times Books, 2003). 135
not enframed by any deeply entrenched if implicit common understanding of structure and counterstructure. They are often immensely riveting, but frequently also wild, up for grabs, capable of being taken over by a host of different moral vectors (170).
The idea that the conceptualisation of the city can be “up for grabs” is especially pertinent in relation to a post-9/11 New York. Indeed, in her article in the New York Times, “The Intertwining Legacy of Terror Attacks and Fiction”, journalist Caryn James notes that writers dealing with the event of 9/11 in their work “depict how the air has changed in cities living with terror” (E1). Notably, these two quotations suggest that novelists who use 9/11 within their fiction deal less with the characters and their own personal concerns, but far more with the ways that New York City and its inherent way of life has altered around them; how the event of 9/11 has manifested through the city itself. If the structure is “up for grabs”, it also makes sense that fiction – the space of the imagination – could re-imagine the urban space of the city in different and even contradictory ways.
The processes of reconceptualising the city after trauma through rewritings can couch the city as a redemptive and generative space after 9/11. In fact, the traumascape of Ground Zero allows crucial rebuildings to occur within the narratives of 9/11. The contested physical efforts to rebuild the site of Ground Zero123 are in fact mirrored in the figurative and rhetorical rebuildings and recastings signified in the literature of 9/11. With the same concerns and anxieties regarding modes of representation and fitting commemoration, the literature seeks to rebuild, if only figuratively and transiently, the damaged city.
123 Since 9/11, much has been written concerning whether to rebuild at the site of the Twin Towers, and what form such a building or monument should take. See, for example, Paul Goldberger, “Building Plans: What the World Trade Center Meant.” New Yorker (2001): 76; Michael Sorkin, Starting from Zero: Reconstructing Downtown New York, (New York: Routledge, 2003); Paul Goldberger, Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture and the Rebuilding of New York, (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004); Marita Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero.” American Ethnologist 31.3 (2004): 319-323; Megan Thee and Marjorie Connelly, “New Yorkers Want Action At Ground Zero.” New York Times 11 September 2005: 1.36; Nicolai Ouroussoff, “A Deepening Gloom About Ground Zero's Future.” New York Times 10 September 2005, Late (East Coast) ed.: B9; David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 56-85 and Charles V. Bagli, “Little Progress Is Seen in Talks on Ground Zero.” New York Times 9 June 2009: A22. 136
The psychic wish to retrieve that which has become lost in 9/11 is a shared imperative or urgency in the novels of 9/11, and a primary demonstration of this recovery through the site of Ground Zero can be found in McInerney’s The Good Life. In this novel, the space of Ground Zero becomes the literal and metaphorical place for absolution within the novel, and illustrates how the alignment of space with the psyche may be redemptive. This is first established through the idea that the event of 9/11 mirrors the lives of the protagonists, who, in the aftermath, also have their lives ripped apart. In McInerney’s novel, the lives of two New York families are explored and contrasted before, during and after the event of 9/11. The husband of one family, Luke, embarks upon an affair with the wife of the other, Corrine, in the aftermath of the event. Brought together by a building unhappiness in their own respective families, 9/11 proves to be a catalyst for them both: they start their affair and also begin volunteering at Ground Zero. Here, the absence of the towers is couched as a symbol of the broader absences within their families, and sometimes even within themselves. One night after volunteering, Luke and Corrine both sit down together. McInerney writes: Luke was mesmerized by the filigreed beauty of the exoskeleton of the south tower, its Gothic arches rising eight or ten stories above them, strangely lacy and delicate and comforting in the unnatural movie-setlight. As they sat in silence trying to take it in, he felt his body go cold, a tingling in the extremities of his hair and a sinking in his gut… The relief operation infinitely more complex, mechanized and specialized, no longer animated by hope. He was looking at a mass grave. When he turned away and looked at Corrine, he saw tears coursing down her cheeks. “Everyone says it's so small when they see it on TV,” she finally said. He shook his head. “Actually, it's huge," she said. "It's the biggest thing I've ever seen” (135).
Here, the bodily wounding of the tower is privileged and its mesmerising “exoskeleton” prompts a bodily response in Luke: “he felt his body go cold, a tingling in the extremities of his hair and a sinking in his gut” and also in Corrine, with “tears coursing down her cheeks.” The profound realisation that this moment brings both characters is that life – the good life? – can never be the same; and that for certain, their own lives have been irrevocably shaped and changed by the event. In this description, the language changes from the fast-paced speed of the frenetic pre-9/11 New York, into a far more elegiac and meandering tribute, for this is one of the first times in the novel that the characters “sat in silence”, without the rest of their superficial concerns 137 overtaking their reflection. Here, the characters of the novel identify with the wreckage, and have bodily reactions to the highly personified towers. Out of this identification emerges a specific type of 9/11 narrative: one which utilises the body in order to mirror the broader tragedy of the event, and one which simultaneously uses the body of the event to point to the smaller tragedies of the individual.
In The Good Life, the spectre of the Twin Towers and the urban site of Ground Zero are used as symbols for the pre and post-9/11 worlds. In this way, the pre-9/11 world where the towers still existed is constructed as a decadent and frivolous era, and carefully constructs the post-9/11 world of Ground Zero as a far more spiritual and philosophical time. At the beginning of the novel, the separate lives of Corrine and her husband Russell and Luke and his wife Sasha are presented as superficial and ostentatious, focusing more on extravagant fundraising charity events and lavish dinner parties rather than paying attention to each other. For example, at a dinner party hosted by Corrine and Russell, one of the guests comments, “[t]his is such an amazing view of the towers”, to which Corrine replies, “It’s nice at night, but the thing is, we’re in shadow half the day” (36). This exchange is characterised by a blasé attitude towards the towers themselves, and further imparts a high sense of competition and financial aspiration; to have an “amazing view of the towers” is to have an expensive apartment in downtown Manhattan that wins a deep mark of respect within this particular coterie.
In The Good Life, while the towers stand, there is a sense of frivolity and excess, comically represented by the two types of salt available – and announced – at the same dinner party: “that’s pink Peruvian salt in the little black dish… and the other one’s fleur de sel from Guérande” (36). But when the towers fall, the space of Ground Zero is literally designated as the place for redemption, particularly for Luke and Corrine. Not only do both embark on duty at a rest stop, making sandwiches and drinks for all of the workers at the site – a stark contrast to their usual gourmet predilections! – but also both feel profoundly changed by what they see, and sense that the site of Ground Zero has transformed them. This contrasts with de Certeau’s assertion that the view down on the city allows for “one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like 138 a god” (92). Here, the fall of the Twin Towers prompts an inner reflection, and the lack of elevation and distance in de Certeau’s terms permits a more human engagement with the surrounding city in psychic terms. Luke and Corrine abandon their bourgeois conceits in favour of more ‘grounded’ occupations, and return to a more simple form of living.
Crucially, the desire to rebuild or recover within the novel is fulfilled by the surrogate recovery of Luke’s daughter, Ashley. Before 9/11, Ashley is a boy- crazy, young teen who is emotionally removed from her father. After 9/11, and after a drug overdose (Ashley’s metaphorical ‘downfall’), she escapes to her grandmother in Nashville. Towards the end of the novel, she returns to New York City with her father, and upon their homecoming, the motif of the Twin Towers recurs to better illuminate Ashley’s own change alongside her father’s: [a]s he drove in from the airport, the sudden sight of the skyline etched against a milky sky filled him with anticipation and melancholy, all of its rich personal and historical significance reduced to a vague melancholy shot through with a single yearning. Even the absence of the twin monoliths, and the ghostly smudge over the tip of the island, seemed inextricably linked in his mind with Corrine. "It's weird, isn't it?" Ashley said, gazing out the window of the Town Car. “I never really noticed them until they were gone” (324).
Here, the characters of Luke and Ashley represent both loss and redemption: by this time in the novel, Luke has decided to end his affair with Corrine and return to his family, primarily for Ashley’s sake. Similarly, Ashley has returned to the family, and begun exploring a relationship with her father where they communicate better and understand each other’s lives. Indeed, Ashley’s recuperation and reappearance in New York City is the surrogate recovery in the novel: although the Towers cannot be substituted or returned, her own return is a substitute return for Luke. Ashley’s comment that she “never really noticed [the Towers] until they were gone”, can also be read as Luke’s own opinion of his daughter: it was not until she was put in peril with her drug overdose that he began to pay attention to her presence.
Surrogate, substitute recoveries also extend to Luke’s own romantic relationships. Despite Luke’s fantasy at the end of the novel that he may meet his lover Corrine again one day, he acknowledges he must return to his wife. Towards the end of the novel: 139
[i]t seemed to him [Luke] both hopeful that he could once more imagine the city as a backdrop to the dramas of daily life and sad that the satori flash of acute wakefulness and connectedness that had followed the initial confrontation with mortality in September was already fading behind them (352-353).
The “satori flash of acute wakefulness” of which McInerney writes is directly linked with Ground Zero and the fall of the Towers, as if Luke’s wish to rebuild at Ground Zero is translates to rebuild his own family.
The literal and figurative desire to rebuild the city after 9/11 recurs within the novels, suggesting the wish within the fiction to fill the spatial voids effected by the event. As novelist Alice Sebold notes after the events of Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, “[n]o, New Orleans will not come back as it was. And yes, it will come back. No, a new building is not the World Trade Center, but there can still be a new heart for downtown Manhattan” (4.14). Here, Sebold suggests that despite the devastation of these events, a “new heart” for the city can still be found. Indeed, Marco Abel writes of Don DeLillo after 9/11 that his work “invokes the need for us to respond to the event by rewriting it” (1240), and indeed, the rewriting of New York City by 9/11 has been taken up within the narratives of 9/11, in ways illustrative of a broader desire to efface the tragedy itself by replacing the Twin Towers, if only in fiction. However, both of these quotations embody the paradox of absence and presence: on the one hand, Sebold concedes the impossibility of a city “coming back as it was”, yet insists on recovery with the adamant, “and yes, it will come back”.
Literature, which constructs a bridge between the real and the rhetorical, allows for an exploration of the psychic dimensions of urban space. The very controversies surrounding the real reconstruction of the site are testament to the myriad difficulties of the rebuilding process itself. In light of such complexities, this section of the chapter examined the diverse demonstrations of this rebuilding wish across the range of novels, and identified the ways in which it desires the return of a pre-9/11 city. In The Zero, the wish to rebuild is a biting and unapologetic one, as characters insist upon the irrepressible nature and resilience of their city. By contrast in The Good Life, the impulse to reconstruct lives post-9/11 is countered by a recognition that some of the effects of 9/11 might have been positive and regenerative for some of the 140 characters. Returning us to the paradox of absence and presence, however, such a fictional reconstruction of this imaginary must perform failure: ultimately the site of Ground Zero can be reinvested with new narrative meaning, but the Twin Towers can never return.
Movements in Space: The Quest to Find Knowledge and the Ephemeral Twin Towers Characters in the novels of 9/11 interact with and reconstitute the fictional city through movement. The various ways in which characters move through their respective cities charts a compulsive restlessness that seeks to find knowledge; to come to an epistemological understanding of their new situations after 9/11. As de Certeau writes, “The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins... These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen” (94). Indeed, the accumulation of knowledge in a traumatised city is a problematised notion when what was taken for granted – the Twin Towers, stability, normalcy – becomes contested, threatened, and ultimately obliterated. Here, de Certeau’s “ordinary practitioners” must negotiate extraordinary situations. Exploring the relative nature of traumatic experience, Walter A. Davis writes in his article, “Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche After 9-11”: [t]rauma occurs when something happens that shatters the ego and its defences. An event persists as an image that awakens other images buried in the psyche, images bound to repressed memories that bring with their return an anxiety that threatens psychic dissolution. The hidden, buried history of one's life presents itself as an awareness one can no longer escape, a self- knowledge one must now construct since that act is the only route to ‘recovery’ (127).
Davis’ observation that an event can “persist as an image that awakens other images buried in the psyche” offers an understanding of 9/11 that conceptualises the event as a trigger or catalyst for “psychic dissolution”. This reading evokes the mindset of many of the protagonists in the literature of the aftermath, who struggle with their own selves after the event, and their place in the larger, wounded city. Further, Davis’ comment that one’s self-knowledge must now be constructed, “since that act is the only route to ‘recovery’”, demonstrates both a real and rhetorical journey upon which the characters must embark. As such, the route to recovery within the novels is often a literal 141 mapping of the city on the part of the protagonist, who must come to terms with their own “psychic dissolution” through walking the streets of the city. Across three novels, Pattern Recognition, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, I will chart the ways in which movement, space and knowledge intersect, and provide us with paradoxical understandings of the character and their city. This will provide a map of the different modes of gaining wisdom in the novels of 9/11, which offer literal and metaphorical routes to recovery in distinct manifestations.
In Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, a novel deeply embedded in the city and urban spaces, clear links are established between the space of the city and the character’s clarity and knowledge. As the narrative moves compulsively between the imposing cities of New York, London, Tokyo and Moscow, Cayce feels devoid of self and struggles to make sense of her surrounds. She believes her jet lag to be the physical manifestation of the soul attempting to catch up to the body. Cayce reminds herself, “[s]ouls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage” (1). This linkage of the metaphysical soul with the quotidian baggage claim announces the text’s first step in problematising the external and internal worlds after 9/11: there resonates a simultaneous irreconcilability and necessary elision of the two. Cayce herself finds herself in the city of the postmodern semiotic and the chaos of signs, echoing Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), and fails to find any information about her father’s death or about the footage, which she has been following.
Further, the city, which can often offer resolution or order, only provides Cayce with labyrinthine complexity. For instance when she is in Tokyo, the strange maps Cayce sees mirror her own confusion. Given that the very function of a map is to orient its reader; to clarify their relationship to their urban surrounds, in Cayce’s case, the opposite occurs. She looks at: [a] broken T scribed with city streets and stings of numbers… Within its outlines are avenues, squares, circles, a long rectangle suggesting a park. The background is pale blue, the t-bone gray, the lines black, the numbers red… The streets directly beneath it are small and twisted, down toward the bottom of the peninsula that forms the T’s upright. Although, she reminds herself, she has no reason to believe this the representation of any island, actual or imaginary. It might be a T-shaped segment extracted from some larger map. Though the 142
streets, if they are streets, align with its borders… She stares at the T-bone city (169-170).
Here, Cayce’s unsettled, grieving mind sees the literal, material map, but struggles to link it to the abstract conceptual environment. Her inability to connect the mapped representation to the reality underlines her grief: she is similarly unable – or unwilling – to connect the material fact of her father’s disappearance in the event of 9/11 with the more abstract idea of his death. She is, in de Certeau’s terms, a “walker” whose body “follow[s] the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ [she] write[s] without being able to read it” (94). The reconstructed city in the novel at this point offers no resolution for Cayce’s quest, but rather emphasises her disjointed state of mind.
The unreliability of the city to offer knowledge or closure in the aftermath of 9/11 is explored through the various slippages that occur in Pattern Recognition, which highlight Cayce’s own troubled state of mind. After 9/11, Cayce travels from her home city of New York to London in a haze of incredulity and grief concerning her father’s missing status after the event. As she walks to her friend Damien’s apartment, “she notices a flyer adhering to a lamppost… In the rain-faded monochrome a frame-grab from the footage. He looks out, as from depths. Works at Cantor Fitzgerald. Gold wedding band” (22). In this scene, three different events, times and places are conflated and united within Cayce’s traumatised and fragmented mind. First, presumably the flyer on the London lamppost is just that, however Cayce immediately links it to a “frame-grab from the footage”, the cult-like segments of film she has been following on the Internet. Further, the last section, “[w]orks at Cantor Fitzgerald [a U.S. global finance firm located in the WTC]. Gold Wedding band” is unmistakably a fragment from a missing poster Cayce saw in New York City post-9/11. Thus, a seemingly benign flyer is confused with the footage, which is again confused with Ground Zero; all sense of temporality, geography and logic become displaced. In this way, a reader is given entrée into Cayce’s own disjointed mind through the fragmented narrative afterimage: a mind that cannot contain the event in a linear temporal sense.
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In terms of 9/11 and time, Cayce’s conflation of these different mental images can be read as a narrative attempt to undermine the event by removing it from New York City via a temporal dislocation. This move occurs later in the narrative, in Moscow, where: [t]he stars are coming out. After a while, when her [Cayce’s] eyes have adjusted, she realizes she can see two towers of light, off in the distance, in the direction she thinks she’s been walking in. They aren’t like the memorial display from Ground Zero, but like the towers of her dream, in London, only fainter, farther away (323).
The towers Cayce sees remind her of the “Tribute in Light” exhibit, where light was literally projected in the space the towers once occupied in March 2002, the six month anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.124 Here the afterimage of Ground Zero is again employed, with the reference to the “towers of light” once more confusing time and space. The “towers of her dream” reflect and haunt Cayce, allowing for her experience of the symbolic towers to transform her state of mind. The embodied towers represent the blurred understanding of time on the part of the protagonist, who in a haze of grief, is unable to undo their relation.125
Such a state, however, changes as the novel progresses. When Cayce returns to London from Tokyo, while she struggles to make sense of the mystery of the footage she has been following, she comes to appreciate her own grief is reflected in the surrounding city of London. Cayce realises, “[a]fter Tokyo, everything here feels so differently scaled. A different gauge of model railroad… Perhaps if London had been… rebuilt, the mystery she’s always sensed in these streets would remain somehow, coded in steel and concrete” (177). In this way, the “coded” mystery that Cayce feels is embodied within London can be read as her own internal dual enigmas: that of her father’s alleged death in 9/11, and the secrecy attached to the origins of the footage. In this way, Cayce realises that the city can be the key to discovering more about
124 For a discussion about the desire to reanimate the towers with the “Tribute in Light” exhibit, see Gustavo Bonevardi, ““Tribute in Light” Explained.” Slate. (11 Mar 2002). http://slate.msn.com/?id=2063051 (accessed 28th September 2009). 125 Such traumatic flashbacks are also fictionalised in William Gibson’s novel Spook Country (2007), published four years after Pattern Recognition. In that novel, a character sees as old photograph of the Twin Towers, and recalls that “[t]hese [towers] were so intensely peculiar- looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to [him] to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in”; Gibson, Spook Country, (Sydney: Penguin, 2007), 97. 144 her father’s disappearance. Such a realisation is well played out much later in the novel, when Cayce has a revealing meeting in Moscow where she meets the famed maker of the footage. At the end of this meeting, the character of Stella reminds Cayce that her driver is waiting to take her back to the hotel, and Cayce responds, “[s]end him away, please. I need to walk. To feel the city” (308). The various moves through different cities in the novel, then, illustrate the mixed states of mind of Cayce, and the effect of imbuing her surrounds with her forges a particular link between the city and psyche. Such a link returns us to the death of her father, too, both in the sense of Cayce’s mourning, and the way in which Win’s death was steeped in the 9/11 city.
Space, then, circumscribes Cayce’s emotional state and her own sentiments about her father’s death. Towards the end of the novel, Cayce is constructed as being unanchored in the city, still not able to accept her father’s death. She is described as feeling: as though something huge has happened, is happening, but she can’t define it. She knows that... somehow she no longer is able to fit it to her life. Or rather she lives now in that story, her life left somewhere behind, like a room she’s stepped out of. Not far away at all but she is no longer in” (293).
In this depiction, Cayce can’t articulate or “define” her own dilemma. But importantly, she is also unable to locate it: it is couched as a “room she’s stepped out of” but one that has no locus. To “step out of” the story, or indeed one’s life, is a spatial void at which the internal contradiction of the text arises: as a protagonist, one must be a part of the story and within its bounds. This type of characterisation of the protagonist offers a particular contradiction concerning narrative and space: the event of 9/11 seems to displace the characters within their own novel. Indeed, it is only when Cayce has come to a pattern recognition of her own, when she accepts her father’s disappearance, that she feels ready to incorporate and understand the city in which she inhabits.
Towards the middle of the novel, Cayce begins to realise that it might be the city that can offer her resolution and knowledge. Overcome with sorrow, Cayce constantly moves – through walking, practising Pilates or travelling – in order to escape the spectre of her father. On one such trip to Russia, Gibson notes of 145 the journey, “[s]he feels as though something more than her soul has been left behind, this time, and she needs to walk it off. Win. She’d started to project Win on those white walls, and that won’t do. The image still ungrieved” (130). In fact, throughout the novel, Cayce fails to acknowledge that her father died in the attacks. She doesn’t engage in the rituals of grieving, as there was no funeral; nor does she admit to his death at the level of language: ““[y]ou write he died, in the fall of the towers.” “Went missing, yes”” (286). Cayce’s intricate and convoluted grief also contains her despair at not having a ‘site’ at which to mourn him. There is no headstone she can visit, and she is disconsolate when she “projects” Win upon white walls, as if denying her own attempt to create a spatial, commemorative site for him.
In order to find the ultimate truth about her father’s death – the mystery that has eluded her for the novel thus far – Cayce must physically engage with the city, and in fact, the earth itself. Combining ideas of Tumarkin’s traumascape, and like many other 9/11 novels that recall the devastation of World War II,126 Pattern Recognition evokes particular elements of that war in order to create a new, urban site for knowledge. Throughout the novel, Cayce find her fathers death indecipherable primarily because of the lack of a gravesite. In a move of spatial dislocation and disruption, Cayce’s friend Damien excavates a Russian site of World War II remains, and Cayce is invited to watch the exhumation. Here, on an archeological dig through the remains of a “strata of Germans, Russians, Germans” (72), Cayce finally mourns the death of her father through physically becoming involved in the excavation: [s]he’d gone… on to the dig… where she’d found herself, out of some need she hadn’t understood, down in one of the trenches, furiously shoveling gray muck and bones, her face streaked with tears. Neither Peter nor Damien had asked her why, but she thinks now that if they had she might have told them she was weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know (356).
Therefore the “vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority” that Cayce experiences at the fall of the towers is only resolved through her own literal body becoming involved with “the tower of gray bone”
126 For example, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) contains flashbacks to the Dresden bombings, In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) refers to Spiegelman’s Auschwitz- survivor parents, and Falling Man (2007) contains a character, Martin, who was a German S.S. officer. 146
(182) that was comprised of bodies from a past war. For Cayce, this engagement with other bodies seemingly acts as a substitute for her own father’s missing body.
Through such a substitute or surrogate body, Cayce is able to mourn through her own reenactment of finding a physical site – a traumascape in Tumarkin’s terms – which she conflates with that of Ground Zero. Further, it is by finding another city – this time in Russia – that she can find acceptance of her loss in New York City. This archaeological dig becomes a means through which Cayce can begin to resolve her own trauma. Accordingly, it is at this end point of the narrative that Cayce’s self and the event can reunite after a prolonged separation – and often denial – throughout the novel.
The quest for knowledge in the novels of 9/11 is also prompted by a failure or loss of trust in the city. In this sense, the knowledge imparted by the city in 9/11 was its very fallibility, which serves to frighten various characters in the novels. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the boy protagonist Oskar who has lost his father in the attacks feels deeply betrayed by the city with the event of 9/11. In a move that I argue seeks to counter such a betrayal, Oskar combats what he perceives to be the dangers of the city by inventing imaginary devices that would help the citizens of New York in the event of another urban attack or disaster. In this way, Oskar needs to engage with the vulnerabilities and vicissitudes of the city before he can come to terms with his own deep grief. He confesses: In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots (38).
The “heavy boots” of which Oskar speaks are part of his own language to describe depression or sadness. From this description, it is clear that Oskar’s inability to articulate his own grief – a reader presumes he was, in fact, the one crying himself to sleep – demonstrates his desire to instead engage with the city; here represented by the imaginary and poetic Reservoir of Tears.
Another of Oskar’s inventions is a telling testament to his wish to protect those 147 around him, and the city itself. This is demonstrated with his desire to invent pockets, and Oskar says: We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends… people we’ve never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe… But I knew that there couldn’t be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone (73-74).
Again, Oskar cannot make sense of his own father’s passing in the event of 9/11, and instead extends these make-believe and whimsical safety pockets to “boroughs and… cities… [and the] universe”. Indeed, the childlike desire to protect others from danger sees the character of Oskar desirous of being his city’s guardian, and it intimates the merging between the individual and their surrounds. Further and crucially, Oskar’s wish to protect the city as a nine year old speaks to the perceived, immense vulnerability imparted by the post-9/11 city. In this way, the literature of 9/11 re-writes the event, producing complex links between the space and knowledge. Furthermore, the real absences associated with 9/11 – the disappearance of loved ones – perpetuate particular patterns of retaliation or protection, such as the conflicting inventions of pockets and the Reservoir of Tears, which both suggest a reluctant concession to the tragedy, and even an admission that another tragedy may strike.
Given the shocking nature of the knowledge imparted by the city in the event of 9/11, Oskar embarks on a self-initiated journey through the city to find out more about a key that he thinks might be a clue left by his father. Much like Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition, Oskar seeks to use the city to provide him with answers concerning his father’s death. When he finds a key with the name “Black” printed on it among his father’s belongings, Oskar embarks on a literal and metaphorical journey through the city. Oskar becomes a literal walker who must travel the city, visiting everyone with the surname Black. Here, the literal key concerning his father’s disappearance becomes the symbolic signifier for Oskar’s coming to knowledge. The name “Black” also represents the vast spaces of nothingness – the immense and varied spatial ruptures scattering the text that refer to the event of 9/11, such as the “huge black ocean” (36) or “deep space” (36). Further, the name “Black” is also an overt allusion to Paul Auster’s canonical, postmodern novel The New York Trilogy (1987) where the characters of Black and Blue play detectives and indefatigably walk the streets 148 of the city. The invocation of Auster’s city imports a desperate and unknowable quality to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and offers a sense of hopelessness to Oskar’s search. Further, the allusion locates us in postmodern space and installs a pre-9/11, postmodern imaginary city into the novel’s landscape, complicating its representation of a post-9/11 world.
In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the cityscape of New York, imbued with resonances of other post-traumatised cities, offers Oskar new forms of knowledge. Indeed, Oskar’s journey, which does not allow him any ‘closure’ in therapy parlance, instead offers him a chance to come to terms with his father’s disappearance through an elegiac move through the city. During his search for Mr Black, he encounters many other characters also named Black who are all in various stages of mourning: one woman who now lives atop the Empire State Building because she lost her husband, and another is in the throes of a messy divorce. One particular character, Mark Black – whose predicament seems also to be a distinctly post-9/11 one – makes an impression upon Oskar. He was: crying when he opened the door and saw us, because he had been waiting for someone to come back to him, so every time someone knocked on the door, he couldn’t stop himself from hoping it might be that person, even though he knew that he shouldn’t hope (242-243).
In this way, the knowledge imparted by the streets of the city is not what Oskar was initially searching for, but rather offers a way of conceptualising and coming to terms with the death of his father and his own stage of mourning. The character of Mark Black who “knew that he shouldn’t hope” is positioned as the ever-optimistic Oskar’s counterpoint: the character who cannot make sense of his own catastrophe, personal or otherwise.
When he finally finds the correct Mr Black, Oskar discovers that the key had nothing to do with his own father, but rather was accidentally sold in a vase his father bought at a garage sale. Instead of unlocking any secrets concerning Oskar’s father, it is actually a key to Mr Black’s dead father’s security box: an ironic metaphor for a discovery concerning the father, but in this case, the wrong father. As Frost notes, the novel is a “a detective novel that resists its own findings. Oskar turns to the only evidence he has: visual evidence that 149 cannot produce the knowledge he purports to seek” (“Still Life”, 188). Towards the end of the novel, Oskar says, “I don’t know [why]… but I no longer felt like I was moving in the direction of Dad. I’m not even sure I believed in the lock anymore” (287). After Oskar discovers the mystery behind the key, he is less traumatised, less reliant on his tambourine, and more amenable to talking to his mother’s new male friend, Ron. He says to his mother, “I don’t want to be hospitalized… I promise I’m going to be better soon… I’ll be happy and normal… I tried incredibly hard. I don’t know how I could have tried harder” (323). For Oskar, the city works as a healing and regenerative space in which he can come to an understanding of the event and the people involved. He becomes closer to his own family and while Ron is not a substitute for his own father, the novel concludes with Oskar once again having two parents, as if the trauma and urban devastation of 9/11 could be undone symbolically.
Importantly, and somewhat paradoxically, a character’s engagement with the city can also produce onerous and oppressive types of knowledge. Indeed, often knowledge is framed as a burden for certain characters, as they struggle to grapple with the information borne out and imparted by the city. In Patrick McGrath’s ‘The Year of the Gibbet’, the first of the three stories that comprise Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, the protagonist Edmund reflects upon a moment in his childhood when knowledge and the city intersected causing grave harm. At the beginning of the novel, Edmund’s mother was actively working against the British occupation in the lead up to the American Revolution, and would travel between Manhattan and Newark passing along information to other revolutionaries.127 On one such trip – the exact geographical locations are given in detail: the Hudson pier, the Manhattan shore, the Jersey shore, Morristown – they are stopped by British guards and interrogated. Edmund recalls, “[n]ever before had our pass been scrutinized with such close attention. I tried not to show my anxiety though I know now that by the very effort I revealed much. But I was a child! What did
127 In a similar demonstration to McGrath’s Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, Nicholas Rinaldi’s Between Two Rivers (2004) draws a parallel between the events of Independence Day and 9/11. Kristiaan Versluys notes that this “parallelism between the flaunting of patriotism and its humiliation points to an intricate sense of the city as a web of interwoven purposes – a mesh of actions and motivations”; Versluys, “9/11 as a European Event: the Novels” European Review 15.1 (2007): 69. 150 they expect of me?” (37). Here, the serious implications of the city as knowledge manifest physically, as Edmund’s anxiety concerning such burdensome information paralyses him. McGrath writes, “[a]ll I could think was that if I told him a lie he would lock me up in a dark stinking hole without my mama. I covered my mouth with my hand and as I did so I saw something flare in his eyes” (38). In this way, Edmund gives his own mother away, and she is eventually hanged for committing treason.
The theme that urban knowledge can be a heavy load that can carry severe penalties for the bearer or those around them is carried through the novel of Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now. For instance in the second story set in early New York entitled ‘Julius’, the wealthy, upper class character of Noah Van Horn dislikes the friendship that develops between his son and an artist’s model whom he suspects is of unsuitable character for marriage. Noah arranges for the young girl to disappear, and despite his son’s intense and wide-ranging search for her throughout the city, she is lost to him forever. Further, in the final story entitled “Ground Zero” which is set in the aftermath of 9/11, the protagonist Dan is haunted by the knowledge that the woman he is in love with – a Chinese prostitute by the name of Kim Lee – was having an affair with a man who died in the attacks. He too walks the city, this knowledge weighing on his mind, unable to see past its significance in terms of his relationship with her. The route to recovery within the novels is often a literal mapping of the city on the part of the protagonist, who must come to terms with their own psychic dissolution through walking the streets of the city to counter, deflect or absorb the spatial ruptures of the event. Paradoxically, the city is also couched as a place of further problems, as characters can also become mired in its urban space.
This second chapter has laid out the ways in which the real city of New York has been reconstructed and reanimated across the diverse range of 9/11 novels. The variously constructed cities in the novels demonstrate the problematics of representation and the diverse modes through which the event itself can be mediated. While some novels reconstruct the present-day city of 151
New York as a fictional substitute128 for the real, damaged city, and seek to rebuild and thus to recover from the tragedy, others suggest that we must look to history in order to retrospectively pre-empt, prefigure or anticipate the real event itself. Crucially, the urban environment of the novels enables us to see fictional cities that can symbolise both damage and regeneration; that can chart epistemological movements across space. In this diverse range of fictional substitute cities, the city is ‘imagined’ within the novels of 9/11, to use Charles Taylor’s term, conjoining urban space and the psyche. Such a reading offers us an account of the city after trauma that incorporates the material and abstract problems of spatiality. This chapter located, theorised and conceptualised the city as a pivotal space and actor within the fiction of 9/11, and leads me to examine the problems and contradictions of temporality within the novels in the third chapter of this thesis.
128 The desire to recover the absences felt and to replace or fill the void does not, of course, only extend to the physical buildings, but echoes and reverberates to the individuals who lost their lives in the attacks. In an uncanny, real demonstration of such a replacement, even Trakr, a search-and-rescue dog used to locate Ground Zero survivors after the 9/11 attacks, has been cloned; Ed Pilkington, "Dog Hailed as Hero Cloned by California Company." The Guardian 18 June 2009. 152
Chapter Three
“Time is out of joint”: Temporality in the Novels of 9/11.
“[9/11] has been widely presented as an interruption of the deep rhythms of cultural time, a cataclysm simply erasing what was there rather than evolving from anything already in place, and threatening a yet more monstrous future”. - David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4.
“Time is broken. The events of the first day bleed into the next and all the powerful emotions and disturbing sights are now so hard to put in proper sequence”. - Novelist Peter Carey quoted in David Campbell, “Time Is Broken: The Return of the Past in the Response to September 11.” Theory and Event 5.4 (2002), 1.
The event of 9/11 was itself deeply embedded in temporal concerns: not only was it a surprise attack, but it was also one that threatened to change the future. Having analysed the ways in which 9/11 has affected both corporeality and spatiality and subsequently how those domains are rebuilt within literature, in the third chapter of my thesis I offer an analysis of temporality in the novels of 9/11. My primary argument is that the literature of 9/11 reconstructs a range of temporal crises from the real event that are made manifest through 153 structural peculiarities and particular thematic preoccupations, which suggests an insistent and paradoxical compulsion to return to a pre-9/11 world or to ‘move on’ from the event in time. My argument will map out the complex relationships between the event of 9/11 and time, and analyse how the two connect, intertwine and rebound from each other. In so doing, I will provide an analysis of the range of narrative, structural and symbolic temporal strategies that recur across the novels. The consequent suspension (and often collapse) of chronology and linearity pervades much of the post-9/11 oeuvre, as the texts perform the dilemma of representation of the event in the aftermath. As Teresa de Lauretis suggests, “states of emergency have the capacity to collapse history and suspend the logic of linear temporality” (367-368). In the literature of 9/11, a real temporal collapse is fictionalised and is demonstrated in various and occasionally opposing operations and tropes. I will examine these paradoxical forms that include avoidance, denial, repetition, discussion, refusal and mourning, all of which press against each other within the novels, creating a complex fictional engagement with time that speaks to the manifold difficulties of writing after a traumatic event. In light of such difficulties, and invoking the paradox of speech and silence, at times the novels seek to represent the event, to commemorate its passing and to deny its existence.
Further complicating the relationships between time, trauma and literature is the fact that time is not only a thematic and structural conceit within the novels: it is embedded in their very production with particular resonance given the 9/11 context. In this way, the novels both contain fictionalised temporal crises and, as material artefacts, also respond to the event itself. Indeed, much of the literature of 9/11 was written in a time where emotions were hastily recollected with no sense of reflection, but rather with a prevailing awareness of chaos and terror.129 The memorialisation of 9/11 through literature seems to be occurring at a far more rapid rate than after any other ‘international’ trauma.130 Simpson
129 See, for example, Dwight Garner, “The Ashes.” The New York Times 18 May 2008, BR1. 130 The New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani noted, “Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” was written some 60 years after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia; Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem,” memorializing World War II, was not heard until 1961; and John Corigliano’s AIDS Symphony did not have its premiere until 1990, a decade after the composer began losing friends to the illness”; Kakutani, “Portraying 9/11 as a Katzenjammer Catastrophe.” New York Times Book Review 31 August 2004, E.6. Further, Marita Sturken notes that the rush to commemorate and memorialise the event became an “obsession” in the aftermath; Sturken, 154 writes, “[i]n the wake of 9/11… [t]he time is out of joint, which means that we must work all the harder to find its history and to dispel its mysteries. The time to come is unimaginable if we do not” (9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, 170). The temporal proximity of the event of 9/11 and the subsequent literature raises questions concerning when and how to speak, attempting to represent the “out of joint” temporal concerns. Returning us to the “Tribute in Light” memorial, in 2002 Bonevardi wrote that it is “too soon to build a permanent monument” and that “nobody has yet achieved the perspective necessary for a more lasting commemoration” (para 8). The fictionalisation of these concerns opens up a reading of the novels that suggests the often contradictory temporal operations and tropes are the result of the disorienting post-9/11 environment itself.
In temporal terms, there are also clear dangers of adopting a convenient or hastily formed framework within which to critique the event of 9/11. In particular, Simpson suggests that critics “take time” for the processes of memorialisation and commemoration to occur, and recalls Jacques Derrida’s comment concerning 9/11, where he remarked that we do not yet “know what we are talking about” (9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, 9). This observation has often been misunderstood, and was, to a large extent, ridiculed by the contemporary media who interpreted it too literally.131 In fact, Derrida’s entreaty offers a useful platform upon which to base my discussion of the literature: the suggestion that the processes of remembrance and mourning are often substitutes offered in lieu of sustained analysis and critical debate.
I begin this chapter by first identifying and analysing the proleptic fantasies of destruction projected onto the city of New York before 9/11 within the narratives of literature and film. I argue that the historical accounts of fictional trauma located in New York City invoke a very peculiar relationship between the event of 9/11 and the concept of time within the novels, due to the ways in
“Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero.” American Ethnologist 31.3 (2004): 321. 131 See Edward Rothstein, “An Appraisal: The Man Who Showed Us How to Take the World Apart.” New York Times 11 October 2004, sec. B1: 7. For further discussion on Derrida’s concerns with the nomenclature of 9/11, see Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 147-150. 155 which the event appears to have realised various prophecies of catastrophe. In this way in the fiction of 9/11, the palimpsestic layering of the theme of ruination operates in hysteron proteron moves, as the narrativisation of the event is both imbued with its own tragedy, and the manifold iterations of fictional tragedies past.
Various fictional temporal disjunctions, prompted by the hysteron proteron operation, recur across the novels, such as disrupted linearity, the wish to freeze time, the desire to undo the event of 9/11 and the tendency to conflate different temporal events with 9/11. In this section of the chapter, I will analyse the different narrative patterns by which the fiction invokes and complicates time. First, the disrupted linearity suggests a post-traumatised narrative, and encapsulates the true horror of the event through various types of narrative dislocations. Second, the narrative focus on pausing time – of wishing to keep the narrative in a static position – reveals the psychic wish to deny the event of 9/11 by not moving forward within the narrative. Both of these strategies demonstrate a preoccupation with defying time and further, a desire to return to a pre-9/11 world. The third type of temporal disjunction I examine is the fictional compulsion to undo – of going back in time – which is a dominant trope within the novels. Here I look at the literal undoings demonstrated across the range of fiction, and compare the different types of narrative manifestations of seeking to turn back time which relate to the re-telling of the event itself. Finally, I investigate the idea of temporal conflation and identify the various ways in which the novels of 9/11 fuse the event with other tragedies. I argue that despite the implicit inefficacy of such a strategy within the fiction, the child- like desire to reverse time remains a profound and insistent fictional pattern, which speaks to a desire to divert the true trauma of the event. Such a desire relates to a broader wish to create a substitute, pre-9/11 city, free from the threat of terror and the reality of damage. In the final section of the chapter, I examine the recurring trope of the ghost, along with the repeated temporal conflation of 9/11 with other tragedies, both fictional and real. I argue that the texts interrogate past iterations of trauma in their treatment of 9/11, and I chart the patterns by which this recurs across the novels.
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The specific novels I will analyse in light of the trope of time in this chapter fall into two main groups of narratologies that show a wide range of temporal experiments. These novels demonstrate the difficulty of speech or narrative after an event that has no clear ‘end’ or definitive moment of closure, and which inaugurates, in many ways, quite the opposite: a beginning. Rather, much like a real traumatic recollection, these novels retell 9/11 through a disjointed and temporally unstable narrative structure. The vehicle of narratology is a highly appropriate lens through which to investigate the temporality of these texts, as time is most overtly disjointed within the structure and function of the narrative itself. The first main category of novels maintains a non-linear narrative structure, and is comprised of Joyce Maynard’s young adult The Usual Rules (2003), Michael Cunningham’s historical trilogy Specimen Days (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s mournful The Writing on the Wall (2005) and the futuristic Pattern Recognition (2003) by William Gibson. These four, disparate novels contain temporal prolepses and analepses throughout their narratives, continually moving through time and space in order to re-tell the story of 9/11.
The second category of novels I examine are also non-linear, but include fragments or shards of dialogue, and very often images scattered through the novel. Don DeLillo’s coldly philosophical Falling Man (2007) and Jess Walter’s comic novel The Zero (2006) both use shards or snippets of narrative, which move quickly from one time or space to another. Further, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) are comprised of non-linear narratives that are also visually disrupted by images. In Spiegelman’s case, his graphic novel is told in newspaper-style sheets, each of which shows a different aspect of the aftermath. In Foer’s case, various photographs, letters and drawings are scattered throughout the novel, disturbing the story itself in an attempt to represent the post-traumatised132 mind of the protagonist.
132 Although I analyse fictional manifestations of trauma in this thesis, I write with an awareness of the charged debates surrounding the symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. For an excellent discussion of this disorder, including its genesis and manifestations, see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 230-245. 157
The Imaginary Disaster History of New York City Before the seemingly unimaginable catastrophe of 9/11, the use of imaginary, pre-emptive destruction of New York City in novels as early as H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), worked as a prophylactic against destruction, as if presaging fictitious horror in the imaginary could prevent its occurrence in the real. These fantasies of destruction in art and literature,133 then, sought to anticipate the event, or to habituate us to its possible occurrence: even Jean Baudrillard noted of 9/11, “we have dreamt of this event” (The Spirit of Terrorism, 5). Slavoj i ek, too, notes the various ways in which the terrorist threat itself was already “libidinally invested in a series of movies from Escape from New York to Independence Day”, in such a way that “the space for it was already prepared in ideological fantasizing” (Frow, 72). In fact, the imaginary disaster history which so pervaded literature and film pre-9/11 is meaningfully elucidated through Freud’s theorisations in “Medusa’s Head”, where he discusses the operation of apotropaia,134 and suggests “[w]hat arouses horror in oneself will produce that same effect upon the enemy against whom one is seeking to defend oneself” (“Medusa's Head”, 74). So just as Athena wears the apotropaic image of the Medusa to protect herself, so too does art use the most terrifying images to scare away its proverbial, anticipated demons. As psychoanalytic anthropologist Howard Stein claims, “[c]ulture always anticipates and rehearses for later reality, even for reality for which its members feel unprepared” (190). Such a temporal shift indicates a desire to use the known terror to deflect the unknown, which in part accounts for the various rehearsals of trauma within the limits of New York City in literature and film before 9/11. It was as if pre-9/11 novelists and filmmakers incorporated acts of destruction in order to ward off damage in the real by enacting it in the imagination.
133 Allen Feldman notes the ways in which the “eschatological destruction of the city has been rehearsed in a series of Hollywood, science fiction and disaster films, Planet of the Apes, Escape from New York, [and] Independence Day”; Feldman, “Ground Zero Point One: On the Cinematics of History.” Social Analysis 46.1 (2002): 114. 134 I am indebted here to Thomas Albrecht’s article which offers an insightful discussion concerning the operation of apotropaia; Albrecht, “Apotropaic Reading: Freud's “Medusa's Head”.” Literature and Psychology 45.4 (1999): 1-30. 158
Therefore, the event of 9/11 was the enactment of so many imagined rehearsals of disaster, which resulted in an hysteron proteron move: it seemed as if the event had already occurred in time. Pre-9/11, the employment of prolepsis installed a sense of imagined doom in the centre of Manhattan, as narrative and film conjured up powerful demons and brought them within the city boundaries. Proleptic disaster – the fictional representation of a tragedy before it exists – brings together notions of time and catastrophe, as it necessitates the employment of an unseen disaster, and installs crucial ideas of ‘before’ and ‘after’ in narrative. Indeed, by its very definition, a proleptic disaster relies on the calamity not having yet occurred. It follows that the event of 9/11 appears to be the enactment of fantasies of trauma, which creates a peculiar engagement with time within the novels. As postmodern literary theorist Joseph Natoli notes, “[t]he planes that flew into those towers flew into an America that brought the world to meaning in a style learned from Hollywood movies” (18). In this way, and following Howard Stein, art often concerns itself with, and is symptomatic of, producing anticipatory projected demons, creating a sort of mythic reiteration.135 Indeed, John Frow notes of this tension between past and future tragedy that: [t]he plot of the Event of September 11 - the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by terrorists - might have been written by Hollywood, or by Baudrillard. So fantasmatic, so familiar was the scenario that it fitted seamlessly into the Manichaean agenda of the Pentagon hawks planning the next American war, and the next… How do we take fantasms seriously when they come true? (69).
The “familiarity” of the event that was, in fact, profoundly foreign, speaks to the deeply uncanny nature of the event of 9/11, which had seemed to have already occurred many years earlier. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes of this pattern, “[m]any witnesses to the collapse of the towers reported a sense of unreality. They felt like they were watching a movie they had seen before” (16). As if already in our minds from cultural representations, it seemed as if “we have been rehearsing the events of September 11… quintessentially in the
135 Marita Sturken offers an insightful analysis of the miniature toy Twin Towers souvenirs sold after 9/11. Again invoking an hysteron proteron logic, she notes “[t]hese souvenirs... participate in a kind of reenactment, a statis in which the moment of the towers’ fall is imagined to not yet have taken place. In the constant reinscription of the twin towers, these objects project a fantastic time, in which the towers stand still yet are charged with the meaning of their loss, their presence re-enacted”; Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 218. 159 action movies that have perfected the formula of explosions, collapsing buildings, [and] malign perpetrators” (Rotella, 50).
The films of which Rotella and i ek write crucially demonstrate an engagement with time: their very horror depended upon the fact that the events portrayed had not yet occurred. Further, Rotella’s reference to a “formula” designates the rehearsed and conventional nature of trauma narratives that was applied to 9/11 in the aftermath. The same argument can be translated to the realm of literature, where fantastical destruction occurred safely within the pages of novels, in an attempt – like the actions of Athena – to reflect and deflect the imaginable (but seemingly impossible) catastrophe. The fantasy of anticipation in pre-9/11 literature and film leads me to examine the wished-for fantasies of disaster that exist alongside the fantasies of its deflection.
Before the event of 9/11, the imagined horrors of what could befall a city paradoxically served as forms of reassurance and denial: this could never happen to us. Indeed, the notion of a fantasy denotes a scenario that is unreal, and it can also be one that might be wished for or desired. In his study, The Original Accident, theorist Paul Virilio contends that humans secretly desire catastrophe through their inventions and achievements, and he posits that all accidents are provoked by innovation. According to Virilio, the “accident is diagnostic of technology. To invent the train is to invent derailment; to invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck” (Der Derian, “Interview with Paul Virilio”, para 10). Such an invocation recalls Henri Bergson’s conception of “possibility”, in which the image of the real is projected back into the past before its realisation, when it was but one of a number of possibilities.136 Of course after 9/11, all other possibilities were made redundant, as the highly unlikely possibility of the destruction of the Twin Towers was in fact enacted in reality. To paraphrase Virilio, to invent the skyscraper was to invent and presage its calamitous downfall.
136 See Henri Bergson. “Le Possible Et Réel.” La Pensée Et Le Mouvant, (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1939), and Eric Méchoulan, and Roxanne Lapidus, “Immediacy and Forgetting.” SubStance 34.1 (2005): 145-158. 160
Fantasies of destruction also sought to explain the event in the symbolic domain, so as to conceptualise 9/11 as a ‘mere’ repetition instead of a terrifying and inexplicable event. For example, the term “Ground Zero” (originally used to refer to the impact points of the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki)137 was employed and now relates to the World Trade Center site. Amy Kaplan notes of this appropriation, “[t]he term Ground Zero both evokes and eclipses the prior historical reference, using it as a yardstick of terror – to claim that [9/11] was just like the horrific experience of a nuclear bomb” (84). Further, a photograph of three firemen raising the American flag atop rubble at Ground Zero is now heralded as an ‘icon’ of September 11: but it directly calls forth and echoes the famous photograph of American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima, in February 1945 (Stein, 190). As Marianne Hirsch notes of the tendency to appropriate past terms and images for a new trauma, “[i]n their search for one lasting image, [they] were looking for the conventional, not the new” (B14). Further, and creating a connection to the Muslim world, architect Laurie Kerr points to the ways in which the courtyard of the World Trade Center contains a replicated plan of Mecca’s courtyard.138 The wish to make the event familiar, then, leads us to examine the ways in which the novels of 9/11 paradoxically incorporate the event.
Retrospective Anticipation: Hysteron Proteron Post-9/11, the very act of writing the event into literature works to historicise 9/11, seemingly denying its symbolic power, and the apparently inimitable nature of the attacks. Rather than perceiving 9/11 as a frightening, anomalous catalyst that could well foreshadow future devastation and uncertainty, authors instead turn to the historical archive in order to retrospectively ‘anticipate’ the event within fiction. As David Simpson writes of the capacity of art to represent trauma: literature is… the very thing that makes [suffering] bearable and open to acceptance without the loss of self and potentially without a fully
137 John Whittier Treat notes the dissonance produced by using the term ‘Ground Zero’ for 9/11, and suggests it is “ethically wrong” (1884) to do so; Treat, “Hiroshima, Ground Zero.” PMLA 124.5 (2009): 1883-1885. 138 Laurie Kerr writes, “[Architect Minoru] Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality”; Kerr, “The Mosque to Commerce: Bin Laden's Special Complaint with the World Trade Center.” Slate. (28 Dec 2001). 161
compassionate response: I know, I’ve already read about it. The prefigurative imaginative experience makes bearable the shock of the real (127).
The enduring need to align the event of 9/11 to other events; to see it as a repetition of sorts, works as a convenient vehicle to cope with the shock of the unexpected within the novels.
The fiction of 9/11 interrogates and complicates the enactment of fantastical destruction in hysteron proteron moves, and dislocates and displaces the event of 9/11 in ways both anticipatory and reflective. In Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, the event of 9/11 is reflected upon as a fait accompli, as if the “unbridled chutzpah that the towers came to symbolize” (Lipton and Glantz, 5) could be retrospectively read as inviting catastrophe. In the novel, the German character of Martin is represented as a figure with a shady history as a German officer in World War II. Martin says of the attacks on 9/11: [b]ut that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so that you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down (116).
The “obvious provocation” of the towers suggests a desire to retrospectively predict the event of 9/11, as if to write a new history whereby, as Stein notes, the fiction “anticipates and rehearses for a later reality”. Here, the notion of the fantasy is also overtly engaged with the idea that the height and repetition of the towers play out a flirtation with disaster: “[y]ou build a thing like that so that you can see it come down”.
This retrospectivity is a key element in the fictional attempt to anticipate the disaster: Martin’s arrogant after-the-fact assertions seek to place the event of 9/11 not as a terrifying anomaly, but as something that should have been expected. Further, the character of Martin acts as a signifier of trauma, as he lived through World War II and he speaks with the assurance and confidence of one who has experienced trauma within the urban landscape, and not in the seemingly innocent register of an American. In a Bergsonian approach to time, Martin reflects upon the event of 9/11 and discounts the possibility of any 162 alternative future for the towers, in a way habituating readers to the foreign and traumatic ruptures of 9/11 – both aesthetic and practical.
In Falling Man, such a habituation also occurs through the character of Lianne, who desires to come to terms with 9/11 retrospectively through editing a book on the event. Lianne’s compulsion to complete this book with its “statistical tables, corporate reports, architectural blueprints, [and] terrorist flow charts” (138) seems to arise because she believes the data “seemed to predict” (139) the event itself. Lianne’s reflective and repetitive research points to a retrospective need to understand the event and incorporate it into her own understanding and experience. Moves of temporal anticipation and retrospection are also embedded in the very structure of Falling Man: the two narratives of Keith Neudecker and Hammad, one of the hijackers, move in opposite directions. Hammad’s narrative is linear, and follows the hijacker’s progress as he trains under the tutelage of Mohammad Atta.139 Conversely, Keith’s narrative is entirely backwards: the novel begins with the event of 9/11 having just occurred. Jenny Edkins notes this tendency in reality with the real coverage of the event of 9/11. Here: television channels were reduced to playing over and over again the images of the aircraft hitting the buildings... the incredible, unbelievable events were relived... as if in an attempt to overcome the shock and surprise of what had happened (225).
In a similar way, the temporal movement of retrospection occurs through the narrative of Falling Man, appearing to accustom and acclimatise the characters – and arguably by extension the reader – to the event of 9/11 itself.
In a demonstration of metacritical hysteron proteron moves, the very practice of reading DeLillo’s novel Falling Man in light of his other novels produces complex temporal slippages. The novel continues a long history of focusing on the terrorist figure especially in the American context. For instance, in Players (1977), a suspected terrorist network may be involved with a murder at the New York Stock Exchange; White Noise (1985) dealt with an “airborne toxic event”, Libra (1988) examined the life of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and Mao II (1991) investigated the connections between literature and terrorism.
139 Literature theorist Linda Kauffman also notes this opposing narrative structure; Kauffman, “World Trauma Center.” American Literary History 21.3 (2009): 652. 163
Even Underworld (1997) featured the Twin Towers dwarfing St Paul’s Chapel on the cover, with a bird hovering nearby, prophetically symbolising the other future birds of the air, the airplanes of 9/11.140 Falling Man continues the same tropes of paranoia, terrorism, and conspiracy all within the urban boundaries of New York City, but further couples these with a strange sense of his past predictions having come true. As critic Tom Junod notes, “the Don DeLillo novel became the template for 9/11; now 9/11 returns the favor, and becomes the template for a Don DeLillo novel” (“The Man Who Invented 9/11”). Furthering such a sense of disjunction, Andrew O’Hagan writes referring to DeLillo, “[w]hat is a prophet once his fiery word becomes deed? What does he have to say? What is left of the paranoid style when all its suspicions come true?” (para 11).141 Almost as if answering O’Hagan, to characterise what is left, DeLillo focuses his narrative on loss, and his protagonists are stuck in the temporal paradox of being unable to forget but unwilling to remember the event of 9/11.
Developing the idea of using time to accept and become accustomed to 9/11, Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, employs temporal dislocation that operates to ‘rehearse’ the event retrospectively. Aimee Pozorski suggests, ““trauma’s time”... refers to a radical change in the way we understand the relationship... between time and consciousness, of [trauma’s] effects not only on the present, but the past, and – most strikingly – the future” (75). Following the conception of trauma effecting a change on the past and the present, the differences between the practice of storytelling before and after 9/11 are explicitly interrogated with the insertion of a fictional narrative called the “Sixth Borough” within Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This is a story told to the protagonist Oskar by his father before 9/11, which describes the existence of a sixth borough of New York City that floated away and was never recovered. The supremely fantastical nature of such an occurrence echoes the Freudian conception of the apotropaic: this story represents an
140 Tom Junod also notes this prefiguration and further comments in his article, “The Man Who Invented 9/11” that DeLillo was “prescient enough to put the looming towers on [Underworld’s] cover, standing high and ready to fall”; Junod, “The Falling Man.” Esquire, 2003. 141 Tim Adams also notes the correlations between DeLillo’s past novels and the event of 9/11; Adams, “The Sage of 9/11.” Review. The Sydney Morning Herald 9 June 2007, sec. Spectrum: 34-35. 164 emblematic fear of the sanctity of New York’s five boroughs being breached. Oskar’s father explains this mythic borough’s disappearance and says, “[o]f course they tried to save it… Chains were moored to the banks of the islands, but the links soon snapped. Concrete pilings were poured… but they, too failed. Harnesses failed, magnets failed, even prayer failed” (219). Pre-9/11, the idea of ‘losing’ a piece of New York City seemed at once preposterous and fabulous, and Oskar’s telling reaction, “[t]hat story was really awesome, Dad” (223) underscores a sense of wonder and awe at an event which could seemingly never happen. In fact, this fantasy of destruction seemed “awesome” by virtue of its perceived impossibility. Of course, after the version of the event of 9/11 in the novel occurs when a piece of New York City really did disappear, the story itself – and Oskar’s father who dies in the attacks – is no more. Oskar wishes for that same innocence when grieving his father, and he laments, “[h]e would have told me the story of the Sixth Borough” (326).
Further, the true horror of this fictional catastrophe lies in the characters’ ignorance of what happened to the individuals involved: “[a]s all of the Sixth Borough’s documents floated away with the Sixth Borough, we will never be able to prove that those names belonged to the residents of the Sixth Borough” (222). The story of the Sixth Borough operates as a prophetic and foreboding device in the novel, as it is later Oskar’s father himself who was never recovered after 9/11. In a movement of reflection, a reader coming to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close imbues the story of the Sixth Borough with the real event of 9/11. Therefore in temporal terms, the reader is privy to the dramatic irony in relation to Oskar and his father before they experience the fictionalised event of 9/11 within the novel, and also to Oskar’s post-9/11 desire to bring his father back and to undo the event.
A more sinister and ominous version of storytelling that involves prolepsis occurs in The Writing on the Wall, where the twins Renata and Claudia play with a toy farm and animals as children. For years, the girls played happily with Farmer Blue and Mrs. Blue (12), conjuring hundreds of narratives and adventures for their imagined family: “the Blue family had milked the cows, gathered eggs, planted and harvested in relative serenity” (13). However it is 165
Claudia who wishes to disrupt these narratives, and early in the novel, “Claudia had been pressing for something truly terrible to happen. She lusted for mayhem. She wanted strangers to ride in from the plains and steal the horses or kidnap the children” (13). In an emotional climax, Claudia allows the barn, containing all the farmers and the animals, to become engulfed by an imaginary conflagration, and the description offered reads like a childlike re- imagination of 9/11: Claudia blew hard on the [red] crepe paper strips to make them billow. Renata tucked Mrs. Blue and the three children deep in her jeans pocket to keep them safe from Claudia, then seized a miniature fire engine from the shelf and zoomed it up to the barn... The crepe paper strips sank down and Renata ripped them off the roof... The fire was out (15).
Just as Foer’s Sixth Borough story plays out an impossible disaster, conversely the fire in the barn stages the ultimate catastrophe that is averted at the very last moment. Again, a reader can imbue this story as a pre-9/11 repetition of disaster. Crucially also, the juvenile fantasy of reversal seeks to rehearse and re-imagine 9/11: to offer a substitute, if only fictional, recovery.
The Freudian uncanny – heimlich/unheimlich – meaningfully elucidates the ways in which 9/11 can be conceived as a temporal repetition, which retrospectively acknowledges and accedes to the prophetic and proleptic narratives of disaster that have come before. Although David Simpson accurately notes that the date of “9/11” was “not selected with absolute foresight… but fastened on late in the [terrorists’] planning process” (13-14), the cultural implications bestowed upon the date in the aftermath more fully demonstrate the literature’s desire to ‘anticipate’ the event retrospectively, and subsume it into a cultural template or formula of sorts. The date of September 11 is itself a day already marked in bloody history and demonstrates a particular, palimpsestic accretion or layering of memorialisation. For September 11, 2001 was not the first time the World Trade Center was bombed: in February 1993, six people were killed in a truck bombing, and as such, the September 11 attacks seemed to stage a crucial revision or re-run of a past event. Further, September 11, 1989 was also the date of a violent massacre in Haiti (Butterfield, para 18), and September 11, 1973 saw Chilean President Salvador Allende overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet. As Chilean exile Ariel Dorfman writes, “[the] malignant gods of random history 166 have wanted to impose… again a Tuesday, again an 11 September filled with death” (B15).142 The broad desire, then, to anticipate proleptically, or to understand the event retrospectively is played out through moves of narrative temporal dislocation. Further, the desire to point to other tragedies that occurred on this particular day suggests a broader wish to accommodate 9/11 into the archive of history; to incorporate the shock of the event by pointing to other past iterations of violence.
Temporal Disjunctions: Disrupted Linearity While the novels of 9/11 anticipate and rehearse the event of 9/11, they also focus on a narrative and thematic preoccupation with temporal complications or disjunctions. Indeed, the difficulties associated with narrating a complex event like 9/11 are encapsulated by the ways in which time is utilised in the novels; the difficulty of moving forward in narrative often mirroring the reluctance to do so in reality. The first instance of a temporal complication occurs when the linear temporality of the narrative is disrupted; a pattern to which many of the novels of 9/11 adhere as a response to the perceived trauma of the event. In Pattern Recognition, the protagonist Cayce, who is coming to terms with her father’s disappearance during 9/11, is surrounded by overt temporal and spatial voids. These voids speak to Cayce’s personal losses, as well as to the broader sense of loss with which the novel is preoccupied. For example, a theme which recurs throughout the novel is that of “soul-delay”; the theory that jet lag is the effect of the soul being unable to catch up with the body, because, “[s]ouls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage” (1).
This trope of a personified and moving soul is one that extends throughout the novel, especially at points in the narrative when Cayce experiences severe anxiety or panic attacks, reliving the trauma of 9/11. Crucially, the motif of the soul most encapsulates Cayce’s own grieving relating to the event of 9/11. On one of the many aeroplane trips Cayce takes in the novel, she sits:
142 Marc Redfield notes the various different ways in which the terms “9/11” and “September 11” have come to be utilised; Redfield, “What's in a Name-Date? Reflections on 9/11.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30.3 (2008): 220-231. 167
her watch tucked ritually out of sight, dinner served, lights dimmed, she imagines her soul bobbing stupidly, somewhere back over the concrete of Heathrow, its invisible tether spooling steadily out of her. As does a certain degree of fear, she notes, now that she knows they must be far out over an ocean, where no human agents threaten. For most of her life, flying, she’d felt most vulnerable right here, suspended in a void, above trackless water, but now her conscious flying-fears are about things that might be arranged to happen over populous human settlements, fears of ground-to-air, of scripted CNN moments (120).
Here, Gibson directly couples the trauma of 9/11 – the fears of “scripted CNN moments” experienced whilst on an aeroplane – with Cayce’s own soul-delay. Temporally, this creates both a past and present understanding of the catastrophe: that is, it acknowledges the trauma Cayce underwent during the event of 9/11, and simultaneously evokes the trauma and uncertainty she still experiences. In fact, each time she flies to another city, a literal break occurs: she is taken out of the city – out of the world of the novel – and into a spaceless place, in this case, over a nameless ocean. Indeed, Cayce even experiences fear that is outside her own conception of fear: “for most of her life, flying, she’d felt most vulnerable right here… but now” (120). While flying “suspended in a void”, Cayce feels at the point of nothingness – Ground Zero – regarding her soul, and underlining this point, the depiction itself is an uncharacteristically quiet and still one in a novel charged with almost hyperactive movement and noise.
In an associated demonstration of disrupted linearity, the complex relationship between the past and present is brought to the fore in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, where post-traumatised characters come to reflect upon their own traumatic history. After World War II, Oskar’s grandfather Thomas Schell is so post-traumatised that he has lost the ability to speak, and can only look backwards to the past. In order to communicate, he tattoos “yes” on the one hand and “no” on the other. He remembers that “‘I’ was the last word I was able to speak aloud” (17), which places his very subjectivity in the past. In a stream-of-consciousness description, he says of his own trauma: [d]oes it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorant bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and 168
tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? (17).
Here, Thomas again focuses upon the changes that have occurred over time, the ways in which he has changed since the trauma: “the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness… was me”. Indeed, Thomas reflects upon his past self, which “never thought about things at all” and how after traumatic events, “everything changed”.
Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall rehearses the desire for an impossible linearity. The protagonist, Renata, wishes that the process of mourning itself would adhere to a more conventional trajectory and teleology. Towards the end of the novel, and in third person narrative, Renata laments the way time is complicated in the aftermath: [i]t felt, for so long, as if it had happened yesterday. The blue sky, the burst of fire so high up, the pillar of cloud, the rain of paper, the macabre dancers drifting down hand in hand. It refused to assume its proper location in the artifice of linear time – three weeks ago, six weeks ago, eight – demonstrating just how artificial is the notion of linear time. Every morning was the morning after (281).
The event to which Renata refers in this illustration is obviously that of 9/11, with the references to the blue sky, fire, and the “macabre dancers” who jumped from the buildings. Yet the second part of her reflection refers to the conception of time after trauma more generally: the notion that mourning can never be complete or concluded, as every morning is the morning after; or indeed, the ‘mourning’ after. Here it is unclear and purposively ambiguous as to whether Renata is referring to the event of 9/11 or to the death of her sister. The conjunction of mourning and the passing of the trauma as a narrative device brings 9/11 to the forefront of the protagonist’s mind.
Developing the map of temporal dislocations further is the ironic and almost comic manifestation concerning traumatic memory and recollection. In Jess Walter’s The Zero, the post-traumatised protagonist, Brian Remy, is unable to keep track of time or space. In the non-linear and fragmented narrative, Remy constantly finds himself amongst different people or in different places, often unable to remember the purpose of the meeting and in fact, how he got there. Indeed, Remy’s confusion signifies a broader inability to find closure within 9/11 fiction. He refers to these disjunctions as ‘gaps’ and, throughout the 169 narrative, is constantly thwarted by them, seemingly sucked out of every scene into another with no ability to control his actions. He tells his psychiatrist: “Well,” Remy said, “there are the gaps.” “The what?” Dr. Rieux didn’t look up from his notes. “I’m having gaps.” “You’re having what?” “Gaps,” Remy said. “I’ll be doing one thing and suddenly - ” (148).
It is only later in the novel that Walter returns to this scene, where the psychiatrist Dr Rieux says: “[w]hat you’re describing is textbook PTSD. Visions. Stress-induced delusions. Dissociative episodes. Maybe even Briquet’s syndrome” (194). At this point, it is tempting to think that Remy’s condition will be fixed, and yet: Remy held up the medical report on him. “How comes there’s nothing in here about the gaps?” he said. “Gaps?” Dr. Rieux held out the prescription. “What gaps?” “The gaps,” Remy said, as he reached for the prescription sheet and – ” (196).
Throughout the novel, Remy is unable to be in the same space long enough to explain this problem to any other character. Indeed, the text is literally truncated with a dash or ellipsis so as to emphasise the extreme nature of Remy’s “gaps”. In his experience of persistent temporal and semantic slippage, Remy appears to exist in the spaces between the events of the novel. The trauma, then, takes on both the specific sense of post-9/11 trauma, as well as a far more generalised ordeal of the modern: that of being entirely alone and seemingly without an ability to control one’s life. This literal playing out of the metaphorical feeling of being ‘lost’ while post-traumatised adds to Remy’s sense of calamity, while further describing to the reader the inherent difficulty of representing and retelling trauma. The three characters of Cayce, Thomas and Remy all experience traumatic memory through temporal disjunction. While some characters, like Thomas, and eventually Cayce, come to an understanding of their trauma; others, like Remy, constantly battle the narrative structure itself in order to obtain meaning. This complicated staging of trauma as a temporal instability leads me to analyse the wish to stabilise and freeze time within narrative: to offer a secure alternative to the troublesome unpredictability of linearity of post-trauma time.
Temporal Disjunctions: The Desire to Freeze Time 170
One of the temporal strategies that underscores the perceived unresolvable nature of the fiction of 9/11 is the desire to ‘freeze’ time in the aftermath. Such a desire to ‘pause’ reality is a fantastical and almost childlike assertion of control over an event. But it can also be read as a denial, as if the power of the event was so great as to overwhelm modes of representation, forcing them into stillness. Here, I argue that the fiction offers the imaginative possibility of undoing the event of 9/11. This can be read either as a form of fantasy and denial, or as a concession to its occurrence. As James Shapiro says of the 9/11 novel, “somebody has to come along and see something that happened at that moment in a way that is new to the people who breathed it, who felt it and who saw it again and again on television” (Wyatt, E1). In this way, the literature of 9/11 can be understood as a stage upon which to play out the fantasy of gaining control over the event of 9/11 by engaging with temporal moves; doing, as Shapiro suggests, something “new”.
In Joyce Maynard’s The Usual Rules, the figure of a child is utilised to represent the character who desires to stop time. Here, the protagonist’s younger brother Louie seeks to use the strictures of time in order to master his environment. In fact, Louie cannot differentiate between reality and what occurs in films or on television, and therefore believes that real life can be acted upon just as television can be. Maynard writes: [p]ause, Louie liked to say when he got up from the couch to go to the bathroom or get a cookie and he didn’t want you to do anything until he returned. Rewind, he said when he came running back in the room and it looked as if things had been going on without him. Sometimes they’d be watching a video, but he also said it if someone was reading to him, or if they were playing Go Fish or checkers. He thought you could freeze time in real life, same as on video. If rewind wasn’t possible, then pause. Freeze forever at this moment and never go on to the next, and it would still be a million times better than what happened when he did (20-21).
Here, the childlike simplicity – or even childish egotistical will – of wanting to rewind real events demonstrates the deep urge on the part of survivors in narratives of tragedy to go back to the time before the event occurred; to “freeze forever at this moment and never go on to the next”. Inevitably, this type of game is shown to fail in The Usual Rules: Louie learns firsthand of his own powerlessness when his mother is killed in the 9/11 attacks and he cannot retrieve her. Despite its inefficacy, the desire to freeze time speaks to the loss 171 sustained in the event, and the narrative endeavour to use time as a means of recovery. The character of Louie essentially comes to enact a concession about freezing time: that, inevitably, it is impossible to do so in reality.
The protagonist Oskar in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close grapples with the competing ideas of proximity and distance in relation to his father’s final moments, and continues the portrayal of the child’s inability to understand both the linearity of time and the extent of trauma. Throughout the novel, Oskar alludes to his father’s death in the fall of the Twin Towers, while never explaining how he came to discover this fact. Towards the end of the novel, Oskar reveals that he was at home alone on the morning of 9/11, and heard his father leave a message on the family’s answering machine. Torn in the moment of trauma, and compelled by the desire to arrest time yet paradoxically frozen himself, Oskar listens to his father’s last moments: I just couldn’t pick up. I just couldn’t. Are you there? He asked eleven times. I know, because I’ve counted. It’s one more time than I can count to on my fingers. Why did he keep asking?... Sometimes I think he knew I was there. Maybe he kept saying it to give me time to get brave enough to pick up. Also, there was so much space between the times he asked. There are fifteen seconds between the third and the fourth, which is the longest space. You can hear people in the background screaming and crying. And you can hear glass breaking, which is part of what makes me wonder if people were jumping (301).
The revelation that Oskar not only heard his father’s death firsthand through this message, but that he was also unable to talk to his father underscores his broader desire to stop time. When he notes the “fifteen seconds” between his father’s questions, it is as if he, as an auditory voyeur of his father’s last minutes, was imploring time to reverse its trajectory; to freeze time. Further, Oskar’s assumption that his father was giving him “time to get brave enough” speaks to a wish in the aftermath for time to heal the wound of his father’s passing.
The coterminous desires of undoing or freezing time emphasise the inability of art to counter death, and highlight the inability of the fiction to actually mediate the losses of 9/11. A complex repudiation and denial of the desire to control time is played out in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. In the novel, the character of Terry Cheng enacts the impulse or desire to forget and to freeze time as an 172 alternative to remembering the trauma of 9/11. In the aftermath, Cheng, a friend with whom the protagonist Keith played poker, retreats to a hotel in order to gamble full-time. He explains: [w]hen you check in, they give you a map. I still need it, after all this time. I never know where I am. Room service brings tea bags in the shape of pyramids. Everything’s very dimensional. I tell them not to bring me a newspaper. If you don’t read a newspaper, you’re never a day behind… The idea of later was elusive (199-200).
Such a strident refusal to engage with life in the aftermath designates an explicit rejection of time: “[i]f you don’t read a newspaper, you’re never a day behind”. Indeed, Cheng is entirely temporally disoriented: he can’t ‘map’ his own way through this part of his life, and doesn’t know the time or even the day of the week. Further, when playing cards, Cheng is careful not to do anything to remind himself or others of the event. He was: the player who divided the chips, half to each winner, high and low. He’d do it in seconds, stacking chips of different colors and varying denominations in two columns or two sets of columns, depending on the size of the pot. He did not want columns so high they might topple. He did not want columns that looked alike (128).
The psychological trauma of 9/11 even pervades an event as mundane as allocating poker chips, and the immense efforts Cheng performs in order to forget or deny the event of 9/11 – even going so far as to avoid building poker- chip replicas of the Towers – speak to a desire to leave the memory to the ravages of time. To Cheng, time is the enemy: as if the processes of time allowed the security of the towers to be breached and for the attacks to play out. Later in the novel, when the character of Keith decides to travel to play international poker games, his wife Lianne asks him: isn’t it [professional poker] demoralizing? Doesn’t it wear you down? It must eat away your spirit. I mean I was watching on TV last night... Tick tock tick tock. What happens after months of this? Or years. Who do you become? (216).
Lianne, who also wishes to undo the event of 9/11, cannot understand why it is that Keith must avoid time by travelling through time zones and playing a timeless, spaceless game. Moreover, Lianne’s impatient nature cannot tolerate the slow pace of poker: it seems only to emphasise her sense of disjunction after 9/11. Much like Louie’s attempts to ‘pause’ reality, Keith and Cheng’s repudiation of time is obviously unsustainable in the long term, yet as a narrative device, it offers the imaginative possibility of undoing or denying the event. 173
In Falling Man, the recurring focus on art depicted ‘natura morta’ or in ‘still life’ further demonstrates the problematics of art capturing and mediating loss and death. This type of artwork – traditionally of a bowl of fruit, a dead fish, or even a skull – is symbolic of a memento mori: an enduring reminder of death. A still life painting is immune to the passage of time and is forever both memorialised and immortalised. The focus on still life paintings also returns us to the notion of the image versus language that is so central to the novels of 9/11, which seeks to provide a counter to the immediate and horrifying images of the event itself. In particular, this type of artwork profoundly affects the character of Lianne, as she has become aware of her own mortality and finds reflecting upon the event of 9/11 profoundly painful. In fact, Lianne wishes that life could even be like a still life painting, and that it could have stayed still in a moment before 9/11, such that that event would have never occurred.
The character of Martin is also focused on the still life paintings, but not because he wants to undo time and the event, but rather because he cannot extricate the two. He says of the same paintings: I’m looking at these objects, kitchen objects but removed from the kitchen, free of the kitchen, the house, everything practical and functioning. And I must be even more disoriented than usual after a long flight… Because I keep seeing the towers in this still life (48-49).
Here, Martin superimposes the iconic image of 9/11 – the Twin Towers – onto a still life painting unrelated to the event. This process can be read as a metaphor for the ability of trauma to affect other aspects of the characters’ lives, at different times and in different spaces. As Joseph Natoli notes of the vivid imagery of 9/11, “we can’t picture the world or talk about any past picturing of the world without those 9/11 lenses on” (19).
Such an incongruous re-appearance also occurs to the character of Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition. Grieving after losing her father in the attacks, she travels to Japan and also sees the imprint of her trauma in unlikely places. Standing in Tokyo city amidst bright neon lights, “[Cayce] sees the Coca-Cola logo pulsing in a huge screen, high up on a building… This vanishes, replaced by a news clip, dark-skinned men in bright robes. She blinks, imagining the 174 towers burning there, framed amid image-flash and whirl” (125). This imprint of the burning towers is a temporal (and spatial) disjunction illustrating her post- traumatised state. Further, the suggestion of “dark-skinned men” in “robes” also invokes a particularly post-9/11 aesthetic sensibility. Conversely for the character of Martin, the still life or stasis paintings represent a solid, unalterable moment in time, an ideal that suggests that this moment is unachievable for the characters in the novels who are so profoundly affected by temporal disjunctions.
Temporal Disjunctions: Reversing Time Building upon the notion of the impossible return, the narrative device that seeks to undo the damage of 9/11 further complicates the relationship between the event and temporality within fiction. The practice of undoing literally seeks to rewind time and to re-imagine the city of New York. In this way, much of the literature of 9/11 demonstrates a trend away from anticipating the demon (as it did pre-9/11), and rather focuses on undoing the wrong. Therefore, once the disaster of 9/11 occurred in reality, writers focused on moving back in time in the novels, to before the event occurred. Accordingly, I argue that the novels do not project or imagine a worse future scenario, but seek to undo the damage of this one. These attempts to reverse the damage point to the fact that 9/11 staged an hysteron proteron move, as the event had already been rehearsed and anticipated. In an article after 9/11, author John Updike wrote of the event: [a]s we watched the second tower burst into ballooning flame…there persisted the notion that, as on television, this was not quite real; it could be fixed; the technocracy the towers symbolized would find a way to put out the fire and reverse the damage” (Talk of the Town”, 28).
This same desire to “reverse the damage” is taken up in the literature of 9/11: contrary to the Freudian compulsion to repeat the disaster, there is a compulsive desire to do over; to undo the damage, and to start again.
The idea of reversing time is made manifest in literature through the recurring desire to recover a pre-9/11 world. A literal and highly material manifestation of this trope uses the Sphere sculpture, which was recovered from the site of Ground Zero and resurrected within a mainstream, blockbuster film. In 1966, 175 the owner of the World Trade Center site commissioned German sculptor Fritz Koenig to build a sculpture to sit in the Austin Tobin Plaza that spanned the area between the two towers (See fig 1.2). Constructed of fifty-two cast bronze segments and a steel base, the sculpture came to epitomise wealth and power at a global crossroads, but it also stood as an iconic and familiar landmark to New Yorkers. In the aftermath of 9/11, remnants of the bronze and steel structure were recovered, and the damaged globe has been resurrected and placed in Battery Park in the form of a memorial (See fig 1.2). Koenig himself says of the relocation, “[i]t was a sculpture, now it’s a monument. It now has a different beauty, one I could never imagine. It has its own life, different from the one I gave to it” (Nicholls, 40).
This sphere is literally saved in the film Superman Returns (dir. Singer, 2006) where it symbolises the recovery of a pre-9/11 world. In an article that examines the mythologisation of 9/11 in comic books, Simon Cooper and Paul Atkinson question how the comic book genre that is “predicated upon heroes who consistently save cities from disaster” might respond to an event where “such heroes failed or were absent?” (60).143 One answer is that the filmic iteration of the genre would attempt to undo or reverse the damage. Superman Returns is set in the fictional city of Metropolis, which – much like Batman’s Gotham – references the archetypal city of New York, with the familiar signifiers of skyscrapers and yellow taxicabs. At the beginning of the film, Superman’s first act is to rescue a 747-jet plane from crashing over the city: an undeniable reversal of the event of 9/11. Reinforcing such a reading, later in the film, Superman rescues a man falling from a skyscraper. But the most overt 9/11 reference is when the spinning steel replica of the earth that rests atop the building of the Daily Planet falls from its place, and is rescued by Superman (See fig 1.2).
143 Simon Cooper and Paul Atkinson note that on the cover of the book, “9-11 – The World’s Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember”, Superman stands “reverentially looking up at a large [aftermath] image depicting a range of rescue workers, and all Superman can say is “wow””; Cooper and Atkinson, “Graphic Implosion: Politics, Time, and Value in Post-9/11 Comics.” Literature after 9/11, Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 68-69. 176
This directly alludes to Koenig’s sphere which, lacking superhuman intervention, was not lifted to safety during the 9/11 attack. As Cooper and Atkinson note, the “introduction of an extra-diegetic event [such as 9/11] into the world of the comic book also entails the convergence of mythological and historical worlds” (60). Here, a filmic representation of a post-9/11 disaster seeks to undo the real event by playing out the imaginary retrieval of the sphere. Such an imaginary retrieval serves to undo the trauma of 9/11 by creating a mythic memory within fiction.
Fig 1.2. LEFT: Fritz Koenig’s Sphere sculpture in the plaza of the World Trade Center before the 9/11 attacks.144 CENTRE: The resurrected “monument” in Battery Park, Lower Manhattan, photographed by the author in March 2007. RIGHT: Superman saving the Daily Planet globe in the film Superman Returns (2006).145
The filmic desire to undo is also taken up in the fiction of 9/11, and explicitly so in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with various narrative strategies. In an interview, Foer himself says of this temporal desire: [y]ou really think about the order of events on September 11. People woke up, went to work, did their normal routines, and then their lives within an instant changed so dramatically and ended. The unexpected is so close, like when you're walking down a dark hallway and don't realize there's a door or a wall you're about to bump into. I can't help but think how those minutes played out - - but also how they could be undone (Silver, 16).
Articulating how those moments “could be undone”, the novel contains various tropes and devices which seek to turn back time, which also make recourse to the image as opposed to the word. One such device is the inclusion of images
144 Image from http://www.nycjpg.com/2003/pages/0910.html (accessed 10 August 2008). 145 Image from http://www.desipundit.com/baradwajrangan/2006/07/09/a-serious-superman/ (accessed 15 September 2007). 177 at the end of the novel that operate as a ‘flip-book’. That is, when the pages are flipped quickly, they show, as if in cinematic stills, images of the well-known ‘falling man’146 of 9/11, tumbling from the top of the Twin Towers. When the pages are flipped in quick succession, the images of the person falling appear to move, as if in a short film. However, instead of the person falling down – the horrifying and iconic reminder of 9/11 – he magically falls upwards, landing safely atop the tower once more. As Laura Frost notes, this act of “wish fulfillment... defies gravity and temporality” (“Still Life”, 194). Overtly referencing the interplay between protagonist and text, the character of Oskar says: [w]hen I flipped through [the pictures], it looked like the man was floating up through the sky. And if I’d had more pictures, he would’ve flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would’ve poured into the hole that the plane was about to come out of… and the plane would’ve flown backward away from him (325).
Here, Oskar attempts to master the event of 9/11 by using time. As Mitchum Huehls notes, “[b]ecause 9/11 reorients his entire existence around the moment his father dies, [the protagonist] Oskar thinks he will be healed if he can reverse time” (43). If only he could truly flip back time and undo or control the event of 9/11 and return his father, who died in the attacks.147
Foer’s account of childhood mourning links the childlike desire to undo and the first stages of mourning or grief felt by the broader population affected by the event. Of course, the processes of mourning and commemoration are temporal, too, with the stages of reflection marked in time. Marla Carlson notes that while “we create memorials mostly for ourselves, [we also] project ourselves into a hypothetical future… And the memorial activates memories of past losses, collapsing past and future into the present act of memory” (396). As Oskar’s memorial to his father in the form of the flip-book emphasises the literal desire to undo, it also relates to his temporal wish to move past this stage of mourning and to project himself in the hypothetical future of which
146 For an elegant and moving discussion of these images, and the search for the real falling man, see Tom Junod, “The Falling Man.” Esquire, (1 Sept 2003). 147 Further complicating time on a metafictional level, this description also overtly references Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), where the protagonist Billy Pilgrim watches a video where German planes fly backwards in the bombing of Dresden; Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, (New York: Dell, 1971) 73-74. I am grateful to Jenny Kaldor for directing me to this reference. The Dresden bombings, another act of urban traumatic destruction, are also referenced and described in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for example see: 210, 278 and 306-307. 178
Carlson writes. Further, the flip-book returns us to the paradox of speech and silence: the use of images to end a novel certainly speaks to a failure of confidence in language to be able to encompass the enormity of the wish to reverse time.
Oskar’s wish to undo the processes of time and trauma is also made manifest through his compulsive desire to invent contraptions that literally enact ‘undoing’. For example, Oskar considers making a shirt out of birdseed, so that “when you need to make a quick escape” (2), birds will come and carry the wearer away from the imagined emergency. Oskar conceives of another invention of pockets, which would be “big enough for our families, and our friends, and even [for]... people we’ve never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe” (74). Further, Oskar wishes for everyone to carry devices which link them to the people they know. That way, when someone was hurt in an ambulance, signs could flash to loved ones in the vicinity. Depending upon the circumstances, Oskar wishes they could read, ““Don’t worry! Don’t worry!” or “It’s nothing major! It’s nothing major!” or “Goodbye! I love you! Goodbye! I love you!”” (72). While these inventions specifically suggest undoing the event and consequences of 9/11 – Oskar wishes, for example, that the people who had to jump from the Twin Towers were wearing birdseed shirts – the most overt reference to the event is Oskar’s imagined skyscraper. Here, Oskar suggests constructing a building: that moved up and down while its elevator stayed in place. So if you wanted to go to the ninety-fifth floor, you’d just press the 95 button and the ninety-fifth floor would come to you. Also, that could be extremely useful, because if you’re on the ninety-fifth floor, and a plane hits below you, the building could take you down to the ground, and everyone would be safe, even if you left your birdseed shirt at home that day (3).
Of course, Oskar’s obsessive need to create anti-trauma inventions points to the loss of his father. Even on the first page of the novel, Oskar says, “I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so that I could fall asleep” (1), explicitly linking his father’s death with the desire to design. Before his father’s death in the novel, Oskar says, “[b]eing with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing” (12) and later, “I need to know how he died so I can stop inventing how he died. I’m always inventing” (255). As Huehls again 179 notes, “these inventions preempt future death but [also] preclude [Oskar] from living his life” (47). The desire to master time and control 9/11 is demonstrated through the fictional desire to undo the event. Indeed, after 9/11, the inventions are inverted fantasies: instead of imagining a great disaster, they seek to re- imagine or undo the calamity by playing it backwards.
Oskar’s inventions also operate to undo his own nightmarish imagining of the event of 9/11. In fact, he wants a temporally definite understanding of his father’s death. He says: [i]f I could know how he died, exactly how he died, I wouldn’t have to invent him dying inside an elevator that was stuck between floors, which happened to some people, and I wouldn’t have to imagine him trying to crawl down the outside of the building, which I saw a video of one person doing on a Polish site, or trying to use a tablecloth as a parachute, like some of the people who were in Windows on the World actually did. There were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his (257).
Here, Oskar’s inventions seek to undo time, but also to reverse or undo his horrifying imagination: if he could discover how his father died, he “wouldn’t have to invent him dying”.
Developing the trope of undoing further, the novels of 9/11 demonstrate a preoccupation with the desire to firm up the boundaries of oneself: to repeat an act in order to ensure one’s subjectivity in a time of change. In Falling Man, the character of Keith Neudecker attempts to thwart and undo time in mundane and ultimately ineffective ways. For example, he re-addresses the mail he receives which misspells his own name. In fact: [h]e wasn’t sure when he’d started doing this, and didn’t know why he did it. There was no reason why. Because it wasn’t him, with the name misspelled, that’s why. He did it and then kept doing it and maybe he understood at some snake-brain level of perception that he had to do it and would keep doing it down the years and into the decades… He never made the correction in the presence of someone else. It was an act he was careful to conceal (31-32).
The inefficacy of such an act, coupled with the highly temporal terms in which it is couched, point to the desire to use time to remedy a wrong, and the futility of so doing. Further, the fact that Keith will continue to correct letters already addressed to him (and not, one wonders, to write the corrections to the sender of the mail) can also be read as a metaphor for the inability of writers to undo the event of 9/11: that instead its memory will recur much like the incorrectly 180 spelled name “down the years and into the decades”. Using time as a fictional strategy demonstrates the ability to undo 9/11 in the imaginary space of the literature, where the “ideological fantasies” of which i ek writes can be played out.
Temporal Conflation Temporal problematics are further made evident through the identification of a personal tragedy with a broader collective disaster within the fiction. Many texts of 9/11 both identify and conflate their internal catastrophes with the larger trauma of the event, which ruptures linear narrative and confounds traditional conceptions of temporality. Frequently, this strategy results in the conflation of the personal calamity with the collective, which in turn has the effect of mourning both events by re-remembering and fusing them together. It can also be a means for understanding the death of many through understanding the death of one other. Indeed, the conflation of the event of 9/11 with a personal tragedy is not limited to the realm of fiction.
Most of the critical writing on 9/11 in the aftermath centred upon one’s own – almost narcissistic – engagement with the event. The literal fusion of 9/11 with another event usually exemplifies the notion that it is easier to incorporate a large-scale loss of bodies if one can grapple with the small-scale harm to specific individuals. For instance, in her article, “9/11/01=1/27/01: The Changed Posttraumatic Self”, Irene Kacandes uses a personal tragedy – the murder of two close friends nine months before 9/11 – to ‘frame’ the event of 9/11. She writes: [w]hen I first saw the images of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, I was not incredulous. Rather, what I saw were strangers, killing strangers out of hate, out of an unwillingness and cultivated inability to see the humanity of the other. What I saw were two adolescent boys stabbing my friends to death (172).
For Kacandes, the event of 9/11 becomes a platform through which she is able to re-experience and mourn the passing of her friends some months earlier. The emotions she feels in the wake of her friends’ death, she argues, are similar to those experienced by many after the event of 9/11: for example, loss, a feeling of insecurity, shock, and an inability to explain or to represent the disaster. She writes: 181
[f]or me, much of how I experienced September 11 was determined by events that had taken place months earlier… The death by stabbing of two individuals by two other individuals has essentially little in common with terrorist attacks using hijacked passenger jets as bombs, collapsing buildings, and the death of thousands. Indeed, putting these events together could be considered obscene. And yet, that’s just what my psyche did – put the events together (168).
Kacandes argues that the psychological fusion of two separate traumatic events is a common reaction in the aftermath. But it is also a key dislocation of temporality and materiality: the integration of two separate events in time in order to ‘work through’ their trauma. Kacandes’ fusion may also point to a desire to deny the event of 9/11 by superimposing a previous disaster upon its visage.
Translating the concept of dislocation and incorporation through materiality into the literary field, author Jonathan Safran Foer metafictionally incorporates a childhood trauma of his own into the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. When Foer was eight years old – almost the same age as the protagonist Oskar in the novel – he experienced second-degree burns to his hands and face in a school science experiment that went gravely awry. He writes, “I had a very hard time after that, something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years… I couldn’t go to school. I developed an intense fear of public speaking” (Solomon, 42).
Foer’s novel reinvests Oskar with his own bodily suffering: both experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and neither can come to terms with the moment of their ordeal. Indeed, Oskar euphemistically and evasively refers to 9/11 as “the worst day” (11, 68) “because of what happened” (14) and Foer admits in a written interview, “these are, quite literally, the first words I’ve ever written about this. Ever. Literally not a single word” (Solomon, 43). And indeed, even the title of the book, the childishly descriptive “extremely loud and incredibly close” demonstrates a reference to both the event of 9/11 and the explosion experienced by Foer. As the interviewer Deborah Solomon suggests: [i]n writing his novel, Foer, it might be said, combined a personal trauma that occurred in 1985 with the national trauma that befell the country on Sept. 11, 2001. Inside the spaces of his mythologizing imagination, the classroom of his childhood became a metaphor for loss and redemption. In reality, he could not keep the explosion from happening. But he could repair the loss in his art, 182
where he seeks to unmake the past, to unbreak hearts, to get things back to the safe place where they once were (Solomon, 44).
Whether Solomon is correct in her assessment of Foer’s own recovery, it seems clear that artists demonstrate a need to articulate tragedy, and often begin with the past self in order to do so. This also recalls the logic of undoing I analysed earlier in this chapter that permeates Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: the need to repair the loss and find closure is fraught with difficulty.
The conflation of one ordeal with another also occurs within the world of the novel itself, which works to subvert the notion of temporality and the concept of closure. In Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall, the protagonist Renata has a twin sister Claudia, and they both grow up as radically different individuals. The catalyst for their eventual detachment comes when Claudia steals twenty dollars from Renata and does not own up to the theft. Renata’s subsequent emotional separation from Claudia continues as they grow older, and this rift culminates with the gory discovery of Claudia’s dead body, which signals a profound shift in Renata’s own self-conception. On finding the body in the lake: [a] terrible smell drifted to the shore; soon they could see Claudia’s face, green and bloated, her hair tangled with mud and reeds, her clothes shredded, her leg bent back at a crazy angle. To Renata it was like seeing herself, the way she might look, dead (99-100).
The true horror at seeing one’s identical self dead is one from which Renata barely recovers, and although she continues with her own life, she never truly mourns Claudia’s unsolved death until the event of 9/11 occurs many years later in the novel. In fact, on the morning of September 11 Renata is very near the site of the World Trade Center, and in the masses of paper that were flying in the air, she discovers a twenty-dollar note. Renata: had the absurd notion that it might be the same twenty dollars that went missing when she was eleven years old, causing the estrangement from her now-dead twin sister and lasting grief. Changing the course of her life (47).
Here, through overt temporal dislocation, the event of 9/11 is deliberately linked with the loss of Claudia many years earlier; the symbolic twenty-dollar note serves as a synecdochic representation of Claudia’s betrayal, her death and Renata’s own grief. Therefore, the event of 9/11 becomes conflated with Claudia’s death, and Renata begins the mourning process with which she could not grapple previously. In this overt engagement with temporality, Renata 183 can come to understand the hole left by Claudia’s death, by incorporating it into the trauma of 9/11.
The psychic desire to conflate events across time suggests a need to gain a form of closure or certainty concerning the way in which a loved one died: to conceptualise and understand the event and to give it a knowable place in chronological history. For instance, for Renata in The Writing on the Wall, conflating her sister’s death of many years ago with the event of 9/11 offers a psychic explanation for Claudia’s death: she died in the fall of the towers. Despite the inaccuracy of such an explanation – a reader knows Claudia died many years before the event of 9/11 – the desire to know, as opposed to the endless array of guesses, permeates much of the fiction.
Conversely in Falling Man, the conflation of a tragedy with that of 9/11 works to create more terrifying possibilities. The character of Lianne experienced the loss of her father some years before 9/11 when he committed a violent suicide because “he did not did not want to submit to the long course of senile dementia” (40). Many years later when the event of 9/11 occurs, Lianne begins to re-remember her father and his violent death by rifle shot, and again conflates his death with the event of 9/11. Early in the novel, Lianne: was awake, middle of the night, eyes closed, mind running, and she felt time pressing in, and threat, a kind of beat in her head. She read everything they wrote about the attacks. She thought of her father. She saw him coming down an escalator, in an airport maybe (67).
Much like the fictional female characters of Cayce and Renata, Lianne’s psyche moves the two traumatic events together. However here, the event of 9/11 actually creates more psychic possibilities for Lianne’s father’s death: instead of achieving closure through 9/11, it in fact opens up a new realm of frightening prospects through which she re-imagines her father’s traumatic passing.
The psychic desire to conflate acts across time can also be played out politically, as in the case of Falling Man. In a move that is not reminiscent of any other novel written in the aftermath of 9/11, at one point late in the text, the 184 bodies of the protagonist Keith and Hammad, a terrorist onboard one of the planes are actually conflated. Here, Hammad: fastened his seatbelt. A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. He found himself walking into a wall. He didn’t drop the telephone until he hit the wall. The floor began to slide beneath him and he lost his balance and eased along the wall to the floor (239).
In this description, the pronoun “he” is used to refer first to the character of Hammad, on the plane, waiting for impact. Seamlessly, the text moves from the “he” to refer to Keith exclusively and not Hammad. This conflation seems to mirror the two men as opposite reactions; as the very literal ‘other’ body to each other’s world. Further, it echoes Keith’s own inability to distinguish himself from the event at the beginning of the novel; so entrenched is he in the traumatic identification. It also brings the reader’s awareness of time and subjectivity to the fore, as one must work to distinguish and interrogate the psychological slippages employed to articulate the event of 9/11. The temporal and physical conflation that occurs here also brings to bear questions of identity and politics, as the terrorist ‘other’ is merged into the body of the all- American protagonist Keith Neudecker, who, as his last name suggests, seeks also to find new meaning from life; to deal the proverbial ‘new deck’ of cards. This is, of course, simultaneously the same as (and directly at odds with) the terrorist figure, who seeks to gain new life through his self-immolation in the attacks.
Ghosts: Bringing the Past into the Present The return of the images of 9/11 function as ghostings of images past, and as such, the figure of the ghost is used to return a protagonist to the losses sustained.148 For the ghost represents a dual physicality: death and life; presence and absence. But it also acts as a temporal signifier of what is no longer there. Jennifer Wallace notes that Ground Zero is “a site haunted by what is missing” (Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination, 24). As
148 Karen J. Engle offers an insightful account of the ghostings of 9/11; Engle, Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination, (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009). 185 such, the figure of the ghost is the ultimate temporal disjunction itself: an ironic vehicle through which to portray further temporal fractures within the texts. As Simpson notes, the ghost says, “I have come to trouble you, in death as I might have done in life, and to confront what you cannot easily dismiss or understand” (“Where are the Ghosts of 9/11?”).149 Indeed, the very reason that a ghost is frightening is because it heralds the return of the past into the present temporal landscape. Following the idea of the ghost in his study of traumatic aftermaths, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, James Berger writes: [t]he ghost, after all, is the ultimate survivor, for it has actually died and continues to exist. And the ghost is, in effect, pure symptom. It returns to tell a story, usually of the crime that caused its death, and yet, more than bearing a message, the ghost is the message. Its very presence - its survival - is a sign pointing back toward a repressed or an unresolved traumatic event (50).
Taking up Berger in relation to the literature of 9/11, the figure of the ghost is often employed as a “sign pointing back toward… a traumatic event”, that of the fall of the towers. In many ways, the unresolved metaphorical ghost of 9/11 – that which haunts us today – ties together notions of murder, revenge, personal and familial trauma, and further, national trauma. For just as in Hamlet, Marcellus claims, “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”, so too do the ghosts of 9/11 prompt a reassessment of the current state of affairs.
The ghost figure recurs across the novels of 9/11, and I argue that many of the protagonists themselves are actually Hamlets of sorts, grieving their missing father figure and further, playing out that father’s death in the novels. While the ghost of King Hamlet issues a call to arms to Hamlet to “[r]evenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (Act 1, Scene V), the ghosts of 9/11 are missing in a different way, but the dilemma is a similar one: they are suddenly, inexplicably irretrievable to their family, and in particular, to their child. Such a conceptualisation offers a problematic intersection between temporality and the trauma of the event. For example in Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard struggles grievously with her father’s missing status, as if not wanting to believe he is dead, but knowing that he is no longer alive. A description from
149 Departing from the fiction, in this article Simpson argues that there are no ghosts in reality and that commemorative efforts to remember and reflect upon those who died in the attacks have largely gone unrecognised. 186 the middle of the novel suggests, “[t]o have someone disappear in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, with no proven destination in the vicinity of the WTC, not even a known reason why they might have gone there, is proving to be an ongoing nightmare of its own peculiar sort” (185). The ghost of Win travels with and haunts Cayce throughout the narrative, such that “Cayce’s missing person [Win], it had developed, was missing in some additional and specially problematic way” (186). The ghost of Win, or to use Huyssen’s term, his “afterimage”, recurs throughout the narrative as a literal demonstration of Cayce’s loss. Further, Cayce’s mother searches for and listens to electronic voice phenomenon (E.V.P.) recordings, the sounds of which she believes to be Win’s ghost, attempting to communicate with her (184 and 265). In these ways, the vehicle of the ghost is an explicit narrative engagement with the event of 9/11 that refuses to be relegated to the past.
Further, the recurring temporal reminder of the ghost seeks to channel the horror of 9/11 into a memory, and relegate it to the past. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, explicit reference is made to Hamlet – and its ghosts – throughout. When Oskar’s father dies, he becomes fascinated with death, and understands the play Hamlet to symbolise his own grief. Even his annual school play that year is Hamlet, and he is asked to play Yorick, the dead King’s jester. The play co-ordinator says to Oskar, “[you’ll wear all black, and the makeup crew will paint your hands and neck black, and the costume crew will create some sort of a papier-mâché skull for you to wear over your head. It’ll really give the illusion that you don’t have a body” (142). In a telling move, the boy-child who is unable to mourn his father without a body is, in fact, without a body himself in the play. Here, Oskar seems to take up the ghost figure by playing the dead Yorick and wearing all black to hide his own body.
Oskar’s own eccentricities in the novel are also figured as ghostly in nature. This is mirrored with Oskar’s own eccentricities in the novel. For instance, he is always dressed in white (Foer, 3) – a homage to the character of Oskar in Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum (1961)150 – and he is also constructed as a highly surreal character, which makes him less of a real nine-year old and far more a
150 In fact, there are many similarities between the character of Oskar in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Oskar in The Tin Drum (1961). For more detail, see pp. 128-129. 187 pastiche of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and a searcher in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy (1987).151 In some ways then, the character of Oskar is constructed as an unreal and non-bodily, ghostly presence and far more as a metaphor for grief and responsibility after trauma. Further, the colour black has particular resonance for Oskar, as it recurs within the novel as a trope of fear – the black ocean of which he is afraid, and the person he must find is also named Black. Oskar, then, seems not to be visited by his father’s ghost so much as he embodies the imperative to search for clues that will reveal more about his father’s death.
The complex relationships between time and 9/11 are played out in the novels, resulting in dislocated and often fragmented recollections of the event. In fact, the novels contain temporal strategies that achieve diverse goals in relation the event of 9/11: to deny its existence, to undo or reverse its effects, to retell its trauma or to move on from its ramifications. As such, these temporal strategies vacillate between the acknowledgement and the denial of the event of 9/11.
The temporal move to deny the existence of 9/11 is one that proliferates among the texts of 9/11 as a recurring trope and narrative desire. Due to the untenability of the temporal strategies of denial and reversal, the novels focus on retelling the trauma of the event in ways that can incorporate its occurrence into the texts. Here, the peculiar relationship between 9/11 and temporality is developed by the numerous fantasies of destruction that have been historically projected on the city of New York. Due to this relationship, the event of 9/11 took on heightened and particular meanings in the aftermath, as if its destruction was presaged within literature and film. This enactment is also played out through the employment of the afterimage – later repetitions of an earlier iteration of ruination.
The very function of time is troubled with the exploration of trauma in post-9/11 novels. Just as it is difficult to remember trauma with any sense of linearity in
151 Much of the criticism directed at Foer’s novel had to do with the allegedly unrealistic portrayal of the character of Oskar Schell; see B. R. Myers, “A Bag of Tired Tricks: Blank Pages? Photos of Mating Tortoises? The Death Throes of the Postmodern Novel.” Atlantic Monthly 295.4 (2005): 115-121 and John Updike, “Mixed Messages.” New Yorker 81.4 (2005): 138. 188 reality, so too is it problematic to retell the trauma within the space of fiction. As David Simpson notes of 9/11, it is “[t]he violence of the contradictions [which] might disturb us but should also give us some hope for a less mystified future: there is a lot to be worked through” (20). The path to discovering a “less mystified future” seems less than apparent, yet it is clarifying through the fictional vehicle of time.
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Conclusion
“[w]e represent objects, but we can only undergo events. The event as such is not something that can be represented. If anything, events are what drive us to representation. In this being-driven, compelled, commanded to respond, we become something that we were not before. Historical events do not confront us – they overcome us, incorporate us within the process of their unfolding, and in the process, transform us”. -Timothy Rayner, “Time and the Event: Reflections on September 11, 2001.” Theory and Event 5.4 (2002), para 4.
The genre of 9/11 literature entered into and disrupted a moment in postmodernity, demonstrating literary responses that seemed out of kilter and at odds with postmodern forms of representation. The practice of incorporating the particular event of 9/11 into literature reveals manifold peculiarities that affect the formation of the American novel of 9/11. These peculiarities, such as the real crises of speech after trauma, the difficulties of articulating loss and the dilemmas of commemoration highlight some of the complications of fictional utterance concerning the event of 9/11. In the aftermath, W.J.T. Mitchell urges that we should remain committed to “untimely utterances and awkward 190 silences”, to “examin[e] what cannot or should not be said”, and to “reflect... on the conditions of sayability and the unspeakable” (“911: Criticism and Crisis”, 571). However, despite these complex issues concerning when to speak, the novels of 9/11 at once seem to accept the heavy burden of articulation, and to incorporate these problematics, deeply aware of the limits of expression and the book’s status as a cultural artefact. In light of this complicated interplay between the real and the imaginary, the literature of 9/11 bears testament to historical events like 9/11 “driv[ing] us to representation” and “transform[ing] us” in the process.
The literature of 9/11 contains corporeal, spatial and temporal tensions that emanate from the event itself, conforming to paradoxical forms of representation and mediation. In each of these areas, a range of different patterns recur across the novels, reinforcing and reinscribing paradoxical and contradictory moves, such as the desire to reverse time, and the wish to commemorate the trauma. Not content with linear retellings, the novels of 9/11 reconstruct substitute, imaginary versions and revisions of the event, representing and re-imagining the collective memory of 9/11.
The novels of 9/11 demonstrate the imperatives to relive, revisit and reconceptualise the event itself, and seek to reconstitute the myriad losses sustained. The oscillating patterns in terms of representation and figuration and the various reanimations and resurrections of New York City and event of 9/11 in the novels underline the difficulty of writing fiction after catastrophe. Andreas Huyssen notes of this difficulty that it was not the “imaginative ability or inability of artists, architects, and designers” after 9/11 that was called into question, rather it was the “objective problems of representing and memorializing traumatic events” (159). In light of these objective problems, this thesis offered a complex methodological framework through which to read the fiction of the aftermath, using lenses such as psychoanalysis and cultural studies that lend themselves to reading real events and their fictional counterparts.
Specifically, the paradoxes of the event of 9/11 played out in the novels, further reinforcing the problematics of speech in the aftermath. The three chapters of 191 this thesis established the particular interplay of these paradoxes in terms of the body, the city and time. Not only is the body used to authorise speech in the aftermath, but it also speaks to the wish to substitute and to replace the losses of the event. In terms of urban spatiality, the real ruptures of the event profoundly affect the ways in which space is conceptualised within the novels, both in terms of structure and figuration. Further, the novels of 9/11 complicate and reverse time in order to manipulate and undo the event in fiction. Taking these new sites of knowledge together with their respective methodological imperatives, I will draw out four key literary consequences from the thesis that go to the heart of the complex negotiation between the novels and the event of 9/11.
The Paradoxes of 9/11 Recalling novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s question posed at the outset of the thesis: “Why isn't everybody writing about [9/11]?” (Memmott, D5), the very existence of the 9/11 oeuvre stands testament to the desire to reinscribe the event and to historicise its occurrence. Indeed, the fact that the novels of 9/11 acknowledge overtly the controversy of their own subject material suggests that even the very publication of the novels is steeped in ambiguity. In this way, the literature of 9/11 emanates from the tension: how do we write fictional accounts of a tragedy without being seen to capitalise upon its occurrence? Such a foundational concern, steeped in uncomfortable terrain, undergirds the three primary paradoxes of absence and presence, speech and silence and universality and specificity, around which this thesis is organised.
Representation is always paradoxical in the literature of 9/11. Constantly moving between two opposites, authors of 9/11 novels often employ contradiction in order to narrativise the event itself, and to describe the precarious aftermath. This operation suggests the tentative and hesitating moves to inscribe 9/11, and the subsequent, myriad tensions that exist between the dichotomous poles of representation and silence recur throughout the thesis. Characters are child and adult; cities are permanent and ephemeral; and 9/11 is both remembered and forgotten. These tensions reveal that paradoxical representation can be read as a response to the trauma, 192 uncertainty and terror of the event of 9/11. The manifold oscillations within the novels underscore both the real environment of the aftermath, and the psychic dislocations experienced from the event itself. In many ways, given the faltering and wavering environment of the aftermath, it is inevitable that literature would waver, too, between complex and manifold agendas and imperatives. Indeed, by employing paradoxical modes to mediate 9/11, the novels in effect mitigate their own contribution, as if to pre-empt criticism or censure.
Explanatory narratives For all the many oscillations in the novels of 9/11, they share a distinct commonality: the need to offer an explanatory narrative for the event. At the outset of the thesis, I drew on editor Ulrich Baer who noted that in the aftermath of 9/11, there was a definite need to write “the story of this new condition” (4). Of course, the wish to give meaning to senseless acts of violence is, in reality, near impossible, yet the novels of 9/11 collectively perform acts of explanation and recovery in fiction. For instance, the theoretical scaffolding of Maria Tumarkin’s traumascape, which connects sites of tragedy with each other and produces relations between historical and present-day locations. This scaffold enables us to read the novels of 9/11, in particular those such as Specimen Days and Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now which presage the attacks using historical fiction set in older versions of New York City, as placing the event on a continuum of historical violence, rather as a frightening aberration.
The novels of 9/11 can be read as explaining and accepting the event within their pages. The idea of fictional explanation recurs with the various hysteron proteron moves that sought to retrospectively anticipate the event of 9/11, again as if to incorporate and accept the event into history. Further, the notion that a novel could go some way to explaining or delimiting the event is one that Allen Feldman argues can has a restorative function for the event and the novelist, which can “suture an experiential wound” (112). Such responses on the part of the novels reinforce the idea that it is very often art that can mediate trauma: in the safety of the imaginary realm, novelists can re-imagine and 193 manipulate a horrifying event, circumscribing it within the boundaries of the book.
The Recurrence of Metonym The paradoxical oscillations within the novels return time and again to the operation of metonymy. In fact, the event itself, so steeped in symbolic damage as well as the more obvious physical destruction, originates from metonymy: Jacques Derrida notes that the very appellation “9/11” is itself a “metonymy… [which] points out the unqualifiable” (Rothstein, 2004, 7). Importantly, the operation of metonymy allows us to read the novels with a symbolic emphasis that permits us to hold both the image of the original in our mind, in addition to the emblematic reference implied. Various types of metonymy recur across the range of novels, and such a recurrence reinforces the play between the real and the symbolic that is especially resonant in the literature of 9/11. Using this interplay, the novels use the figure of the Twin Towers repeatedly, embedding various couples, twins, and siblings. Whether it is the marriage breakdowns in Falling Man, The Zero and The Good Life, the death of a sibling in The Writing on the Wall and Specimen Days, or death of a parent in The Usual Rules, Pattern Recognition and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, crucially the majority of the pairings in the novels fail by the end of the narrative.
As if to underscore the impossibility of twins in the aftermath of 9/11, the novels all utilise the metonym of the Twin Towers, and incorporate the symbol into the characters in the novels. Further, metonymic representation recurs across the novels in the form of the “Portraits of Grief” series. Here, each portrait operates as an individual metonym, as each individual photograph operates as a referent for all of the victims of the event. Further, when the “Portraits of Grief” are fictionalised in The Good Life and Pattern Recognition, we can read them as a collective metonym for the real losses sustained. In these ways, the symbols of 9/11 when fictionalised do not only retain their real symbolic purchase, but also gain particular fictional resonance.
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The Novels Must Fail: The Invitation to Respect and Sympathise While the literature represents various fantasies of undoing or erasing the event of 9/11, like Jonathan Safran Foer’s flip-book at the end of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, ultimately the novels must perform their own failure to do so. When we read the novels of 9/11, we can understand that the fictional body cannot replace or stand in for the real bodies of the event: there are, of course, obvious limits to what a book can do. However, for the novels to succeed in garnering sympathy and respect from a reader, they must concede their inability to fix or reverse the event of 9/11. Although the novels at times seek to act as new narratives of growth, replacement and reversal, they must admit by their conclusion that such an occurrence is futile, otherwise they would elide the very trauma of which they narrativise. Just as metonymy cannot encapsulate the whole essence of the trauma, so too is fiction unable to heal or fix the ruptures of the event. The performance of reanimation draws the reader to the very impossibility of so doing. Indeed, it is the acknowledgement of such an impossibility that elicits a sympathetic and respectful response from a reader: without it, the novels would fail.
9/11 Novels: The Burden of Change The distinct oeuvre of 9/11 literature takes up the dislocations and profound fractures of 9/11 and at various times seeks to rehearse, anticipate and deny its occurrence. Further exploring the notion of this dislocation, Gene Ray writes, “that’s what mourning means: accepting the burden of change. Going on, not as before, but differently – with the awareness that in the wake of a disclosure, more, and not less, is demanded of us” (2). Here, Ray suggests ways in which one might have dealt with an event like 9/11; hiding from, avoiding, repeating and succumbing to the trauma are all ways in which the novels of 9/11, too, commemorate the event. To tell the story of the event, to ‘read’ the place of paradoxes and substitutions within the fiction of 9/11, calls us to tie together myriad threads of subjectivity, place, body and time in order to repeat and re-imagine the event in literature, and to accept that “more, and not less, is demanded of us” in the aftermath. But further, it is Ray’s suggestion that we must accept the “burden of change” prompted by the event, and “work and play it through into words and interpretations” that relates most strongly to 195 the fiction of 9/11. This literature seeks not to claim an objective telling of the story or stand alone as the one interpretation of the event: rather it moves back and forward between various paradoxes, reluctant to speak after trauma, but necessarily and inevitably moved to do so.
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Appendix I: Précis of texts.152
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson, (2003).
Better known as the canonical cyberpunk novelist of works such as Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson turned his attention to reality after the event of 9/11: a telling move for a science fiction writer. Gibson himself said of this change, “I think reality these days is so much like a science-fiction novel. Now all I have to do is just import all that is around me into my novels” (Bennie, 28). Pattern Recognition was one of the very first of the genre, published relatively soon after 9/11 in 2003. One of the most nuanced and interesting fictional interpretations of 9/11, Gibson situates Pattern Recognition in a futuristic world in which the aftermath of the event appears to be a different reality itself. Gibson’s protagonist Cayce Pollard attempts to navigate life after 9/11 having lost her father in the attacks, however, there is no proof of whether he died, or disappeared in the event. Cayce’s profession as a “coolhunter”, paid to identify and anticipate trends in marketing and branding, leads her to engage in a broader ‘pattern recognition’ as she tries to make sense of her father’s unresolved disappearance. Here, she must piece together fragments of an underground Internet film referred to as ‘the footage,’ and the fractured world following 9/11. The structure of the third person narrative is largely linear,
152 In order of publication dates. 197 and includes involuntary flashbacks to the event of 9/11 and its aftermath as experienced by Cayce.
The Usual Rules, Joyce Maynard, (2003). Written from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old girl named Wendy, this teen fiction novel chronicles Wendy’s mother’s death in the attacks of 9/11 and her grieving process in the aftermath. Soon after the event, Wendy relocates to California to live with her biological father Garrett, leaving her stepfather and brother in New York. In California, Wendy finally learns to grieve the loss of her mother through creating new relationships with different mentor figures. Told in third-person narration, the novel follows a straightforward linear framework, with short memory flashbacks experienced by Wendy when remembering her mother. The main theme of the novel is the struggle to reunite the family unit in the wake of 9/11, and how irrevocable change prompts not only sadness but also positive growth.
In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman, (2004). Art Spiegelman incorporated the trauma of the Holocaust in his Pulitzer Prize- winning two-part graphic novel Maus, A Survivor’s Tale (1986 and 1991) to great critical acclaim. His portrayal of the event of 9/11 and its aftermath in In The Shadow of No Towers takes the form of a highly politically-engaged graphic novel comprised of ten newspaper-sized broadsheets which offers commentary about the effort to publish a counter-journalistic response to the invasion of Afghanistan and subsequently the illegal occupation of Iraq. It also includes a further seven colour plate reproductions of old comics based in New York City, such as Richard Outcault’s ‘Hogan’s Alley’ and Rudolph Dirks’ ‘Katzenjammer Kids’. Each of Spiegelman’s own broadsheets chronicles his post-apocalyptic view of 9/11, his growing neuroses around being safe in Lower Manhattan and the future of the United States in light of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer, (2005). One of the most well-known texts of the genre, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is Foer’s second novel, and is narrated in the first person from the 198 viewpoint of a precocious nine-year-old named Oskar Schell who has lost his father in the 9/11 attacks. Crucially, the novel is the only 9/11 novel that has a first person unreliable child narrator. Set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the traumatised Oskar discovers a key with the name ‘Black’ in his father’s belongings, and seeks to locate the owner of the key – and the lock to which it belongs – in the hope that either will tell him something of his father’s last movements. Much of the novel concentrates upon Oskar’s search itself and the people he meets. Interspersed with Oskar’s own narrative is that of Oskar’s grandfather, a traumatised survivor of World War II. The novel ends with the discovery of the key’s owner, but it in fact unlocks this man’s own father’s safety deposit box, and offers Oskar no information about his own father. It is on the search, however, that Oskar seeks to come to terms with his grief and understand his trauma through the city of New York itself. The structure and visual layout of this novel is one of the most interesting and evocative in the genre, as Foer interpolates drawings, photographs, letters, blank pages and black pages in the text, coming to represent a book which Oskar himself keeps entitled ‘Stuff that happened to me’. Further, Foer writes in a language that is uniquely Oskar’s own: he refers to his own depressed feelings as being in ‘heavy boots’ and the event of 9/11 itself as ‘the worst day’. The images within the novel act as analepses and prolepses on Oskar’s journey to understanding the event of 9/11 and the passing of his father.
Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham, (2005). Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours (2002), which used a fictionalised Virginia Woolf as one of the main characters, Specimen Days utilises the figure of Walt Whitman, who imbues this third-person narrative with a ghostly and distinctly post-9/11 sense of regeneration after trauma. The canonical New York poet is fictionalised as a spectral prophetic figure who presides over each section of the novel reminding the reader that ‘every atom of you as good belongs to me’, quoting sections of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1982). Specimen Days is comprised of three sections that span vast time periods of New York City’s history; the industrial revolution, the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and a future where aliens are the new refugees. Each section features different incarnations of three characters; Lucas, Catherine and 199
Simon, who are deployed by Cunningham to demonstrate the repetitions of trauma and the timelessness of New York City.
The Writing on the Wall, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, (2005). One of the few female writers to fictionalise the event of 9/11 in literature, Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall narrativises different types of losses experienced before, during and after the event of 9/11. As the title suggests, Schwartz incorporates political reflections and arguments within the fictional narrative itself, which seeks to interrogate the question of whether the United States ‘had it coming’ in the aftermath. Further emphasising the political agenda of the novel are sound bites and small excerpts from spoken by President George W. Bush, which are metafictionally inserted into the novel,153 as the fictional narrator becomes increasingly frustrated with her government’s political stance. The novel begins in the immediate lead-up to 9/11, and goes on to detail the horrors of the aftermath for the main protagonist Renata, a linguist. In a non-linear third-person narrative, a reader learns that Renata has lost her twin sister Claudia many years before 9/11 in suspicious circumstances, and grieves for Claudia and Claudia’s newborn baby, Gianna. After 9/11, Renata conflates the death of her sister with the event of 9/11, and even temporarily adopts a baby whose mother had died in the attacks as a substitute for Gianna, who was adopted out many years earlier. Further, Schwartz almost utilises language as a character itself within the novel, as Renata retreats into foreign dialects in order to express the foreign feelings she cannot explain after the event of 9/11. The Writing on the Wall expresses a fervent desire to return to the pre-9/11 world, predominantly through the many losses experienced by the character of Renata.
Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, Patrick McGrath, (2005). Patrick McGrath is a British expatriate who has lived in New York City since the early 1980s, so his literary perspective is interestingly positioned somewhere between the outsider and the self-identified New Yorker. As a result of this duality, the voice of his novel is both wounded and admonitory as McGrath navigates his way from historical New York to the aftermath of 9/11. The novel
153 See pages 64, 74, 78, 80, 86, 89, 101, 111, 112, 133, 134, 141 and 188. A quote from the then Vice-President Dick Cheney is also used at page 178. 200 is set out in a tripartite structure with three fictional narratives occurring at different moments and against real events in New York’s bloody history. The first, entitled ‘The Year of the Gibbet’, is narrated in the first person and is set in the cholera outbreak of the 1830s with flashbacks to 1700s and the lead-up to the American Revolution. The second, entitled ‘Julius’, is narrated in the third person from 1950 but recounts events from New York’s commercial expansion in the mid-19th century. The final section, ‘Ground Zero’, is narrated again in the third person during the immediate aftermath of 9/11. McGrath’s main project in Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now is to demonstrate that New York is a city of profound change, and therefore of loss. In this way, he retrospectively holds up 9/11 not as a new manifestation of unseen violence, but rather as an iteration of recurrent territorial trauma.
The Good Life, Jay McInerney, (2006). New York author Jay McInerney wrote The Good Life as a sequel to his 1993 novel Brightness Falls (1993). Luke McGavock and Corrine Calloway are the two main protagonists of this third-person narrative who are depicted struggling in their respective marriages, and each alternate chapter is narrated from their respective points of view. The narrative contrasts the decadent pre-9/11 world of the Upper East Side with the shattered world of Ground Zero, where Luke and Corrine meet while providing food and drink to rescue workers. From here, they embark on an affair that provides the catalyst for them both to reassess the meaning of ‘the good life’ and how they should live in a post-9/11 world. At the end of the novel, they both return to their respective families and attempt to restructure their lives with their partners, after having come to understand the new and fractured city in which they now live. McInerney’s use of strong characterisation provides an intensely realistic account of the stressful aftermath, as characters grieve for friends they have lost and the security of old.
The Zero, Jess Walter, (2006). A deeply dark satire, The Zero narrativises the life of Brian Remy in the aftermath of 9/11: a New York policeman with post-traumatic stress disorder. The Zero is an entirely non-linear narrative split into numerous short ‘conversations’, most of which end in ellipses as Remy’s fragmented mental 201 state is revealed. Acutely critical of any exploitative behaviour in the wake of 9/11, Walter parodies attempts at commemoration: with tours of the site of Ground Zero for the Yankee baseball team, and the New York police advertising ‘First Responder’ cereal on television. Walter also explores the theme of the loss of the father – a common trope within these novels – but to great comic effect. Here, Remy’s son Edgar embarks upon a grieving process for his father: except Remy isn’t dead. The Zero is relatively unusual in its use of cutting satire, and self-referentially includes varying viewpoints of different characters, almost as an attempt to answer for its own literary mischief.
Falling Man, Don DeLillo, (2007). This novel by one of America’s most renowned authors concentrates on the effects of 9/11 on one family within New York City: Keith and Lianne Neudecker and their son Justin. Separated before the event of 9/11, they reunite temporarily in the aftermath after Keith manages to escape the fall of the towers. The title of the novel obviously alludes to the literal falling people of 9/11, however, it also denotes the tropes of disintegration and falling invoked throughout the novel. Specifically, references to the different types of falls are highlighted through the names of each of the three chapters, which all refer to the mistaken identities of three falling men within the novel, as if to underscore the fragility and instability of subjectivity after 9/11. The first chapter is entitled ‘Bill Lawton’, and it transpires that this middle-America misnomer is the comically misunderstood moniker of the man of whom Justin is afraid: Bin Laden, and as such, works to reference the fundamentalist aspects of 9/11, and the theological or moral falls contained within the event. The second chapter entitled, ‘Ernst Hechinger’, is also the real name of another character in the novel, who it transpires is presumed to be wanted in Germany for crimes committed in Word War II: a direct reference to another global trauma and a moral fall. Last, the third chapter is entitled, ‘David Janiak’, which is the real name of the performance artist known as the Falling Man who, dressed in a business suit and carrying a briefcase, re-enacts a man falling from great heights all over the city in the aftermath of 9/11. At the end of each of these three sections is a short third person narrative from the point of view of Hammad, one of the 9/11 plane hijackers, as he prepares for the attacks. The 202 non-linear narrative composed of analepses demonstrates the complex slippages between identities, and the desperate attempts to reaffirm and cling to them in the aftermath of 9/11. 203
Appendix II: A Chronology of American Fiction of 9/11.
2002 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, ed. Ulrich Baer. September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, ed. William Heyen.
2003 Pattern Recognition, William Gibson. Forever, Pete Hamill. The Usual Rules, Joyce Maynard.
2004 Between Two Rivers, Nicholas Rinaldi. In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman.
2005 The Brooklyn Follies, Paul Auster. Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer. The Third Brother, Nick McDonell. Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, Patrick McGrath. "The Mutants." In I Am No One You Know, Joyce Carol Oates. The Good Priest's Son, Reynolds Price. Absent Friends, S. J. Rozan. The Writing on the Wall, Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Dear Zoe, Philip Beard. After, Claire Tristram.
204
2006 A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, Ken Kalfus. The Good Life, Jay McInerney. The Emperor's Children, Claire Messud. Terrorist, John Updike. The Zero, Jess Walter. There Will Never Be Another You, Carolyn See.
2007 Falling Man, Don DeLillo. Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories, Deborah Eisenberg. The Days of Awe, Hugh Nissenson. A Day at the Beach, Helen Schulman. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid. Blow the House Down: A Novel, Robert Baer. Once in a Promised Land: A Novel, Laila Halaby.
2008 Netherland, Joseph O’Neill The Future of Love, Shirley Abbott. Bullyville, Francine Prose. 205
Appendix III: Cover Art of 9/11 Fiction. The cover art of various 9/11 publications, fiction and non-fiction, demonstrates patterns of representation, such as the focus on verticality, the creation of substitute towers and the noticeable lack of real imagery from the event. The Twin Towers are rarely shown front-on: they are cloaked, shadowed, or elliptically intimated by vast expanses of blue sky.
ROW ONE LEFT TO RIGHT: Ulrich Baer (ed.), 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11, New York and London: New York University Press, 2002; Jay McInerney, The Good Life, London: Bloomsbury, 2006; Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, New York: Pantheon, 2004 and Don DeLillo, Falling Man, New York, London: Scribner, 2007.
206
ROW TWO LEFT TO RIGHT: Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, New York: Harper Collins, 2006; Joyce Maynard, The Usual Rules, New York: St Martin's Griffin, 2003 and Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World, London: Fourth Estate, 2004.
ROW THREE LEFT TO RIGHT: Joseph O'Neill, Netherland, London: Harper Collins, 2008; Laila Halaby, Once in a Promised Land: A Novel, Boston: Beacon Press, 2007; Helen Schulman, A Day at the Beach, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007 and Nick McDonell, The Third Brother, New York: Grove Press, 2005. 207
Appendix IV: Pages from The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. 154
154 Sid Jacobson, and Ernie Colón. The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 63 and 88. 208
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Films:
The 25th Hour (2002), Spike Lee, [135 minutes].
Superman Returns (2006), Bryan Singer, [154 minutes].
The World Trade Center (2006), Oliver Stone, [129 minutes].
United 93 (2006), Paul Greengrass, [111 minutes].