Novel Spaces and Taking Place(s) in the Wake of September 11

Abstract

A trauma that is so it can only be experienced as a kind of fiction. This is how prominent theorists of postmodernism such as Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek have, in part, recently characterized 2001 September 11 terrorist attacks. fact that terrorists staged events to exploit media's inevitable time reportage only complicates matter further. Instantaneously broadcasting images of destruction world-wide, media precipitated its own im-mediation of events, simultaneously making them disturbingly imaged and too close to bone. Writing only days after attacks, novelist Martin Amis declared that September 11 marked the apotheosis of postmodern era--the era of images and perception (4). But this is only half story. For anyone who was not an actual victim, what lay at heart of disaster was traumatic crossing between mediation and visceral reality. sheer horror of event seemed unreal, and not simply because it was disseminated through media images; even eye-witnesses on ground claimed attacks had seemed filmic. It appeared that scale of event could, in reality, only by assimilated in mediated forms. As Zizek has argued in relation to September 11 attacks, The Real which returns has status of a(nother) semblance: precisely because it is that is, on account of its traumatic / excessive character, we are unable to integrate it into (what we experience as) our reality, and are therefore compelled to experience it as a nightmarish apparition (19). As I've written elsewhere, this is tantamount to a form of hyperbolic materialization that ruptures our fundamental coordinates of everyday experience (Houen 4-6). For Baudrillard, basic tenets of real--including very possibility of coming to terms with September 11--were thus no less targeted in attacks, reality is a principle, and it is this principle that is lost (The Spirit of Terrorism 28). Call in novelists. This was response of many newspapers in immediate aftermath of September 11. Call in novelists--the experts at imagining unimaginable, masters of other worlds of possibility. was remarkable about novelists' newspaper articles, though, was that fiction is precisely what they were not being asked to produce. was needed was a restitution of reality as a common principle; personal responses that could translate suspension of belief into emotional eloquence for a public forum. In newspaper articles by writers such as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Jay McInerney, and Zadie Smith, to name but a few, strange comfort they provided was their turning away from fiction in face of carnage. Ian McEwan's response was exemplary of this, questioning whether poets, authors, and fiction could match up to facts of destruction as voiced, for example, in final phone messages left by victims: Last words placed in public domain were once prerogative of mighty and venerable--Henry James, Nelson, Goethe--recorded, and perhaps sometimes edited for posterity, by relatives at bedside.... They set us an example. But these last words spoken down mobile phones, reported to us by bereaved, are both more haunting and true. (1) Understandably, then, McEwan, who is putting his own words into public domain here, seeks to efface status of both himself, his literary work, and article he is writing. Reinvigorating an enormity of truth and real is thus publicly articulated through identifying a general crisis for fiction and writers. As character Bill Gray in Don DeLillo's novel Mao II (1991) puts it, What terrorists gain, novelists lose. degree to which [terrorists] influence mass consciousness is extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought (157). Obviously, that is not to say that a crisis for novelists was main fallout of September 11 attacks. …

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