Spectral Consciousness in Post-9/11 American Poetry
Abstract: After presenting an overview of scholarship on post-9/11 American poetry, my article focuses on a group of largely neglected post-9/11 poems, which deal with spectral consciousness and hallucinatory experiences. In exploring this issue, I have tried to establish a relationship between trauma-related intrusive memories and hallucination on the basis of information-processing model of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD), that clinical researchers also utilise. Moreover, the poems I have chosen not only challenge a number of traditional binaries like, ‘presence / absence’, ‘living /dead’, ‘synchronic / diachronic’ and so on, but also maintain in their most mature form a certain cognitive stability which lends a rich dimension to post-9/11 poetics. While examining spectral consciousness in such poems, my article also identifies interesting points of connection between postmodernism and them.
Keywords: hallucination, post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic memories, binary opposition, post- modernism.
Scholarship on post-9/11 American poetry entails a wide range of important critical concerns.1 Ann
Keniston, for example, explores the relationship between post-9/11 poetics and “belatedness” or, more specifically, “a gap between the time of experiencing an event and the time of understanding it” (662), and also the “disruptions in the process of remembering traumatic events” (661). She notes in passing that a number of powerful post-9/11 poems like “The Anniversary” by Robert Pinsky, “October” by Louise Gluck and so on blur fact with fiction, and the literal with the figurative, to represent 9/11. In “Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and
Private in Post-9/11 Literature” Michael Rothberg convincingly discusses the intersection between the public and the private in three important post-9/11 poems: “Four November 9ths” by Ann Marie Levine, “first writing since” by Suheir Hammad and “October Marriage” by D Nurske. In another influential essay, “Precocious
Testimony: Poetry and the Uncommemorable”, Jeffrey Gray makes a brilliant distinction between the type of post-9/11 poetry which is synchronic and characterised by a self-confident, familiar subject-position quite sure of its own knowledge, and that which is diachronic, incantatory, archaic in its diction and performative.2 This list of examples could be lengthened to include even Ruth Knepel’s “The Return of Myth: Icons, Mythology and the
Universal Narrative of 9/11”, which indicates the mythical status of certain 9/11 images forming a part of “a canon of universal and timeless narratives” (140).3 In this essay, I would like to argue that there is a largely ignored, but interesting, group of post-9/11 poems that not only destabilise a number of traditional binaries – ‘living/dead’, ‘presence/ absence’, ‘self/other’, and even that posited by Jeffrey Gray, that is, ‘synchronic/diachronic’ – but also suggest an intellectually balanced position in focusing on hallucinatory experiences and the uncanny.4 In order to demonstrate my point I have chosen four poems – “High Haunts” by Tish Eastman, “The Dead Have Stopped Running” by Matthew Mason,
“Making Love After September 11, 2001” by Aliki Barnstone and “Strangers” by Lucille Lang Day – which arranged in this sequence imply a gradual aesthetic development in the process of exploring spectral consciousness and our mysterious sensitivity to the unknown.
At the outset of “High Haunts”, the poet’s focus on the “countless tales of structurally displaced spirits” engaged in strange, inexplicable activities like “passing unhindered through solid doors newly hung, / stopping to weep at doors long demolished”, or on “a tale of soldiers visible only from the knees up / marching through a cellar” reflects the speaker’s own “structurally displaced” psyche, a necessary outcome of the shocking carnage of 9/11 and the resultant disbelief in rationalistic thinking. This deduction may seem far-fetched at first sight, but gathers momentum in the next stanza, where the speaker asserts the inability of any rational thought to explain the sudden, simultaneous death of so many people:
No explanations can suffice for these flickering phantoms
Surprised by their moment of sudden death,
random remnants of energy burned into the retina of memory
timeless, looping film images in a final scene, on a final set. (10-13)
The shocking and inexplicable nature of such death and destruction effects the collapse of conventional mode of logic, creating a world of uncertainty and forcing the speaker to think of something beyond the accepted patterns of thought. All this prepares him/ her for raising the two following questions in the fourth stanza as to the flickering of pale desk lamp after unexpected destruction of any skyscraper and the leaping of spectral lovers
“hand in hand from windows/ shattered into shimmering dust” many years ago.
It is quite legitimate at this point to turn to the psychological models of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) that clinical researchers apply to understand the process of potential causal connection between disturbing traumatic memories and the visual or auditory hallucinations related to any psychotic phenomenon.5 As Craig Steel, an Associate Professor in School of Psychology & Clinical Language Sciences of the University of
Reading, points out as an illustration of such tendency of clinical researchers and as a scientific account of such a model:
Steel et al. (2005) focus on information-processing models of PTSD which refer to a shift in information
processing style during stressful and traumatic events (Ehlers and Clark, 2000; Brewin, 2001). Routine
information processing involves a process called “contextual integration” whereby detailed encoding
of incoming stimuli takes place, which facilitates later memory recall . . . However, during a traumatic
event, the need for a quick behavioral response requires rapid information processing. This is achieved
through a temporary decrease in contextual integration and a quick response based on a basic
perceptual processing. The provision of a rapid response to danger has the consequence of a
vulnerability to experiencing intrusive memories of the stressful event at a future date. The reduced
contextual processing of the trauma stimuli makes them difficult to recall on a voluntary basis, due to
the lack of integration with cues which normally facilitate recall. However, the information is typically
triggered involuntarily by stimuli which have a perceptual match to some aspect of the traumatic
event (e.g., the smell of an attacker’s aftershave on someone else). (2)
Moreover, according to the author, the intrusive memories then “may be maintained through a number of cognitive and behavioral processes” (2), which could be reasonably called ‘an avoidance mechanism’, though he does not use the term. Now, on the basis of this current theoretical framework and the Freudian premise that hallucinatory experiences result from the intrusion of forgotten or repressed traumatic memories upon the conscious mind, we can gain brilliant insights into the natures of the poems under discussion.
In “High Haunts”, for example, the bleak contents of the numerous supernatural folktales that the speaker focuses on, are a spontaneous reminder of the traumatic experience of 9/11, which in itself is an outcome of “reduced contextual processing” as it does not take into account “contextual integration” or the process of identifying the broader, historical and socio-political context of that event. This is followed by ‘an avoidance mechanism’, which minimises the memories of actual trauma, shifts our attention to the distant future, and maximises the focus on the probable activities of the phantoms of the victims.
Interestingly, the material condition for the speaker’s utterance – the massacre of 9/11 - strikingly parallels one of the social conditions for the rise of postmodernist thought, that is, the shocking history of Holocaust. In
The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Robert Eaglestone, a well-known writer on the discipline of English studies and Emmanuel Levinas, explores postmodernism as proposed by the works of Levinas and Jacques Derrida “as a response to the Holocaust” (4). Postmodernism, according to him, “focuses on both the acts of comprehending, seizing, covering up, and on the resistance to that act – to the emergence, if only momentarily, of otherness” (4). Michael Bernard-Donals extends Eaglestone’s idea to propose a relationship between
Levinas’s post-Holocaust ethics and his concept of “forgetful memory” (2), characterised by a conflict between memory and forgetting and inseparably connected to the disasters of Holocaust. Bernard-Donals explains that
Levinas puts together the notions of memory as “mneme” or “a fullness of time” (2), and of “anamnesis” or “a rupture of time” (2). As a result of this dissociation between memory and the event, the witness to the event presents “not so much an account of the events (a testimony) as an account of the rupture of language and the void of memory” (2).
Now, there are potential points of connection between this notion of “forgetful memory” and the information-processing model of PTSD that I have drawn on in this essay. However, in keeping with the main purpose of this article, I will not elaborate on the point.
The fifth stanza of “High Haunts” lays out the atmospheric conditions for the perception of the supernatural: stillness and darkness, the two words inextricably associated with absence and death. It is pertinent to note here that the world of the spectres “spiralling down stairwells suspended in the sky / disappearing at the 20th floor, reappearing at the 60th” (22-23), also has movement and life, but of different kind. They are never a full presence, nor a full absence, but something in between the two, that suggests liminality.6
The opening lines of “The Dead Have Stopped Running”, “They walk / through the air, now, / above the living, with the living”, do not hold ‘we’ and ‘they’ as a binary opposition as there is both similarity and dissimilarity between the two. As the poem progresses, ‘they’ becomes a more intimate part of the existence of
‘we’ as the latter comes into contact with the former almost everywhere: We breathe the dead into our lungs,
brush past them in our hurry
down the grey stairs of the subway.
They rest at our coffee tables,
move their fingers across the kitchen counters. (12-16)
These lines and the two penultimate lines of “High Haunts” partially quoted above (“. . . spiralling down stairwells suspended in the sky / disappearing at the 20th floor, reappearing at the 60th”) forcefully remind us of the notion of spectral repetition clarified by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the
Work of Mourning and the New International in the context of explaining the reappearance of the Ghost at the outset of Hamlet in particular and “hauntology” in general:
From what could be called the other time, from the other scene, from the eve of the play,
the witnesses of history fear and hope for a return, then, “again” and “again”, a coming and
going. (Marcellus: “What, ha’s this thing appear’d againe tonight?” Then: Enter the Ghost,
Exit the ghost, Enter the Ghost, as before). A question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant.
One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back. Think as well of
Macbeth, and remember the specter of Caesar. After having expired, he returns. Brutas also
says “again --” “Well; then I shall see thee again?” Ghost: “Ay, at Philippi” (IV, ii). (11)
The poet’s following acknowledgement in “The Dead Have Stopped Running” that “We have ceased our old segregations, / we live with the dead;” (24-25), questions more explicitly the traditional binaries, ‘living / dead’ and ‘presence / absence’, suggesting that life itself has become a shadowy, phantom-like continuity effecting an acute sense of wonder. This poem marks an imaginative advance over the previous one as it brings us into direct contact with spectral experience both in its public and private forms without bothering over external conditions for such experience.
“Making Love After September 11, 2001” with its opening image of the speaker’s bedroom crowded by the ghosts of the victims of 9/11, also does not make any rigid distinction between ‘we’ and ‘they’, although the condition of being bodiless, a defining feature of ‘they’, is regarded as a negative trait by the speaker who obviously possesses a happier psychological state. As he/ she asserts, “. . . they wanted us and to be an us, wanted / to be flesh against warm flesh . . .” (15-16). The most interesting aspect of this poem is the detailed representation of a very intimate moment shared with the phantoms, which is quite missing in the previous poems. The speaker’s imagination is characterised by a high degree of fluidity, and seeks to break free of his / her own self to perceive reality beyond the range of rationalistic faculties. It is a gentle reminder of “negative capability” as conceptualised by John Keats in a famous letter to his brother: “. . . I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason . . .” (277). However, though it can be safely assumed that the traumatic, public event of 9/11 is so deeply embedded into the speaker’s psyche that it is impacting on his / her private self and directing him / her to the way of “negative capability”, he / she does not show any self-awareness regarding the psychological conditions for such hallucinatory experience.
Though “reduced contextual processing” and involuntary recall of traumatic memories are not clearly present in the last two poems, they are fitting examples of the functioning of ‘an avoidance mechanism’, which resists the speakers from directly addressing the traumatic event of 9/11, and permits only a string of associations for aesthetic representation of it.
In “Strangers”, the speaker acknowledges he / she had no knowledge of certain victims of 9/11 prior to the event, but her description of them implies tones of pathos, confusion, anxiety and praise for fortitude, that go far to explain his / her imaginative identification with them. All this prepares for his / her empathetic attachment to those victims in successive stanzas:
Yet I have felt sun on their skin
and tasted wine on their lips.
I have run using the long muscles
of their legs and felt air
rush into their lungs, their hearts pumping in my chest, (25-30)
The opening word of the eleventh stanza, “and”, marks a causal relationship between the speaker’s empathy and his / her spectral experience, focusing on his / her consciousness that the phantoms are the products of his / her imaginative identification. The last two stanzas, in which the speaker sums up the lingering effect of his / her experience, quite overtly acknowledges the truth that this experience is the outcome of an emotionally charged brain-state.
Now they have returned
to earth and air, but I still feel them
stirring inside me, walking
the long corridors of my brain,
searching for something
irretrievable, precious, still there. (37-42)
“Strangers” is the most mature poem in the sequence of poems I have chosen for my purpose in this essay in that it is characterised at once by an imaginative projection into the nature of spectres and a consciousness of the existing psychological conditions for such imagination. Furthermore, this poem entails a relatively detailed “contextual integration” that takes into consideration a variety of reactions of the 9/11 victims. Consequently, instead of maintaining any defeatist attitude that the speakers of the other poems subtly insinuate, the speaker of “Strangers” triumphantly integrates the apparently disturbing event of 9/11 into the framework of his/her psyche and daily existence. In other words, the so-called trauma of 9/11 is no trauma to him/her due to a healthier mental process.
Now I have reached the ending of this article. But before stopping I would like to stress on the point that my article has considered spectral consciousness and hallucinatory state as a neglected part of post-9/11
American poetry so far. And my conclusion is that these experiences not only facilitate our understanding of trauma-related psychological processes, but also offer intellectually exciting ideas, and sometimes even entail a highly developed cognitive faculty, lending a rich aesthetic dimension to post-9/11 poetics.
Endnotes
1. For the primary literature on this type of poetry, see the important poetic responses to 9/11 both in the anthology
form exemplified by Allen Cohen and Clive Matson (eds.). An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on
9/11. Oakland, CA: Regent Press, 2002; Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians (eds.). Poetry After 9/11: An
Anthology of New York Poets. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2002; William Heyen (ed.). September 11, 2001:
American Writers Respond. Silever Springs, MD: Etruscan Press, 2002; and in the form of major poems typified by
Louise Gluck, “October”. Averno. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2006, 5-15; Suheir Hammad, “first writing
since”. Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Edited by Judith Greenberg. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003, 139-
143; Amiri Baraka, “Somebody Blew Up America” Counterpunch, October 3, 2002,
www.counterpunch.org/poem1003.html.; Galway Kinnel, “When the Towers Fell”. Strong is Your Hold. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2006, 37-42; Robert Pinsky, “The Anniversary”. Gulf Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2007, 19-21; C. K. Williams, “Fear”. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006, 601-602; and Frank
Bidart, “Curse” Star Dust. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005, 25-26. See also Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be
Lonely: An American Lyric. St. Paul: Graywolf, 2004.
2. However, the author does not focus on the clear gap between “a missed experience” which is “neither
chronologically linear nor diachronically constituted” (264), and “A precocious mode of watching . . . proceeding
diachronically” (264), that can raise fundamental questions about the viability of such “precocious testimony”
(263).
3. For other important studies of post-9/11 American poetry, see Scott Cleary, “A Bird in the Hand: Aesthetics and
Capital in the Anthology Poetry After 9/11”. Terror in Global Narrative: Representation of 9/11 in the Age of Late-
Late Capitalism”. Edited by George Fragopoulos and Liliyana M. Naydan, Srpinger Books and Business Media,
Palgrave McMillan, 2016, 77-91.; Mark A. Tabone, “Narrative Wreckage: Terror, Illness, and Healing in the Post
9/11 Poethics of Claudia Rankine”, Ibid., 95-117; and Philip Metres, “Beyond Grief and Grievance: The poetry of
9/11 and its aftermath.” Poetryfoundation.org. 7 Sept. 2011. Web. 31 Oct. 2014. See also Richard Gray, “Imagining
the Crisis in Drama and Poetry” After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11”, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2011, 145-192; and Lawrence Goldstein, “The Response of American Poets to 9/11: A Provisional Report”, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XLVIII, No. 1, (Winter 2009), for scholarly overviews of post-9/11 American poetry.
4. The type of hallucination I am going to primarily deal with in this article is visual in nature. A visual hallucination is
defined as “a perception of an external visual stimulus where none exists” by Victoria S. Pelak, an MD, in “ Approach
to the patient with visual hallucinations”. It contrasts with a visual illusion which is a “distortion or modification of
real external visual stimuli” (Ibid). Moreover, visual hallucinations are themselves categorised into simple and
complex forms. A simple visual hallucination (SVH), usually qualified as non-formed and elementary, refers to
geometric shapes, lights, colours and objects which are not separate, while a complex visual hallucination (CVH)
denotes a clear, discrete image or scene as we could perceive in our real life, for example a person, an animal etc.
For such categorisation, see the foregoing source, and V. Pelak and G. Liu, “Visual Hallucinations”. Current Treatment
Options in Neurology, Vol. 6, No. 1, 75-83, 2004.
5. For the classification of and the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, see American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.), Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013, 271-280;
American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM IV, Washington, DC:
American Psychiatric Association, 1994; and World Health Organisation, “The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and
Behavioural Disorders”, 120-121, Retrieved 2014.01.29. And for a scholarly overview of PTSD - its definition, the
root of PTSD diagnosis, the relation between PTSD and trauma, its assessment and effective treatment - see James
D. Herbert and Evan M. Forman, “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, Practitioner’s Guide to Evidence Based
Psychotherapy, edited by J. E. Fisher and W. O’ Donohue, New York: Springer, 2006, 555-566.
6. For postmodern understanding of ‘liminality’ and the application of the term to literary studies, see Theo D’ haen
and Hans Bertens (eds.), Liminal Postmodernisms: The Postmodern, the (Post-) colonial, and the (Post-)feminist,
Atlanta, GA: Rodopi Press, 1994; and Mihai Spariosu, The Wreath of the Wild Olive: Play, Liminality and the Study of
Literature, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997.
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