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Literature and Democratic Criticism: the Post-9/11 Novel and the Public Sphere

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Literature and Democratic Criticism: the Post-9/11 Novel and the Public Sphere Literature and Democratic Criticism: The Post-9/11 Novel and the Public Sphere Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Neuphilologischen Fakultät der Universität Heidelberg vorgelegt von Maria Diaconu April 2016 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Dietmar Schloss Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Günter Leypoldt Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 9/11 in Intellectual Debates ................................................................................................... 2 Liberal Humanism(s) .............................................................................................................. 6 The Post-9/11 Novel ............................................................................................................. 12 Chapter 1: Irony Is Dead, Long Live Irony: Satire after 9/11 ............................................................. 21 The Unbearable Triviality of Being: David Foster Wallace’s The Suffering Channel and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children as September 10 Satires .................................... 34 A 9/12 Satire: Jess Walter’s The Zero .................................................................................. 48 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 57 Chapter 2: Playing the Victim: The Politics of Memorialization and Grief ........................................ 59 Sentimental without a Cause? Memorialization, Secular Humanism and the Sentimental in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ............................................ 67 “There Is Nothing More Abstract Than Reality:” History, Art and Representation in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man ......................................................................................................... 87 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 99 Chapter 3: Put Yourself in Their Shoes: The Terrorist Other and the Liberal Self after 9/11 ...... 103 Terrorizing the Subject: The Last Days of Muhammad Atta by Martin Amis ................... 112 An American Idiot: John Updike’s Terrorist ..................................................................... 125 Writing “Novels about Human Beings:” Don DeLillo’s Falling Man .............................. 145 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 154 Chapter 4: “In No One We Trust:” Cosmopolitanism after 9/11 ................................... 158 Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism: Communicative Pathologies in Amy Waldman’s The Submission .......................................................................................................................... 164 Trusting Memory: Cosmopolitanism between Tolerance and Hospitality in Teju Cole’s Open City ........................................................................................................................... 188 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 209 Instead of a Conclusion: “Mistakes Were Made:” the Neoliberal Imagination and the Post-9/11 Novel ............. 217 Neoliberalism, Liberal Democracy and the Left ................................................................ 217 The (Neo)liberal Imagination ............................................................................................. 228 Historical Synchronicities: Neoliberalism and the Utopian in Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge ............ 237 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 260 1 Introduction And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.1 No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy.2 This study is primarily concerned with the impact of and challenge posed by September 11 on the liberal imagination and on the capacity to produce “democratic criticism” of the liberal public sphere in the twenty-first century. September 11 has given impetus to the self-reflexive impulse in American culture and literature has joined the national process of self-searching and self-questioning. Seeing literary works as an expression of what Lionel Trilling has called “the liberal imagination,” I will argue for the necessity of updating the term with the help of Edward Said’s defense of humanism for the twenty-first century. The close readings of major literary works depicting September 11, as well as of several works which do not engage with the attacks directly, but have unmistakably been written in and about the decade marked by what Art Spiegelman has called “the shadow of no towers,” offer a particularly poignant perspective on the role of literature within the public sphere and reveal the challenges that the liberal imagination faces at a time when liberalism itself is once again both highly contested and fiercely defended. Before offering an overview of the dissertation’s structure and chapters, certain preliminaries are in order. I will begin by briefly sketching the intellectual climate after September 11, focusing on the conflicting views within the liberal left regarding the nature of the threat posed to liberalism by fundamentalism. Next, I will outline my methodological approach highlighting the need to reconsider Lionel Trilling’s notion of “the liberal imagination” in view of historical realities in the twenty-first century and suggesting that Edward Said’s reevaluation of liberal humanism as the locus of democratic criticism can offer 1 C.P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, ed. George Savidis (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 18. 2 Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 28. 2 a path to do so. I will proceed with outlining the main concerns of the chapters, after placing my contribution within the expanding discussions regarding post-9/11 American literature. 9/11 in Intellectual Debates It has become a cliché by now to say that we live in a “post-9/11 world,” with the event turning into an unavoidable reference point for the recent history and intellectual life of the United States and the rest of the world. A plethora of literary works have been published bearing the “post-9/11” designation, as part of a marketing strategy promising to offer an insight into the first part of the 21st century. The notion of “a post-9/11 world” alone carries the implication that it represents a moment of rupture. The question of whether the terrorist attacks of September the 11th 2001 represent a watershed moment remains open, but the event has since then been upstaged by a series of partly interconnected crises, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Arab Spring, the onset of the civil war in Syria in 2011 and the subsequent migration crisis, to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, the global rise of nationalistic right- wing movements and the ever more dramatic natural disasters connected to the climate crisis. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Jean Baudrillard had prophesied the coming of an age of “weak events,” a time of “frozen history,” but on September 11, which he declared a “strong event,” history seemed to be coming back with a vengeance.3 The snowball of history has kept on rolling since then. Designating 9/11 “the mother of all events,”4 In his view, the collapse of the two identical colossuses embodying Western capitalism and the unchallenged world domination of the US allegedly caused the spectators of the globally broadcasted event to experience an unconscious jouissance, resulting from the fulfillment of their collective wishful thinking. Others, like Jürgen Habermas, have used a moderate tone in weighing the potential historical implications of what appeared to be a watershed moment: If the September 11 terror attack is supposed to constitute a caesura in world history, as many think, then it must be able to stand comparison to other 3 Douglas Kellner, “Globalization and Terrorism: Some Comments on Recent Adventures of the Image and Spectacle on the Occasion of Baudrillard’s 75th Birthday,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2005), accessed June 20, 2013, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_1/kellnerpf.htm#_edn1. 4 Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers (New York: Verso, 2002). 3 events of world historical impact. For that matter, the comparison is not to be drawn with Pearl Harbor but rather with the aftermath of August 1914. The outbreak of World War I signaled the end of a peaceful and, in retrospect, somewhat unsuspecting era, unleashing an age of warfare, totalitarian oppression, mechanistic barbarism and bureaucratic mass murder. At the time, there was something like a widespread foreboding. Only in retrospect will we be able to understand if the symbolically suffused collapse of the capitalistic citadels in lower Manhattan implies
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