A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray

Abstract

Richard Gray's “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis” offers a sharp and necessary diagnosis of the American novel since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Erudite and wide-ranging, Gray's essay combines a sense of historical sweep with a keen understanding of the specific dilemmas of the present. Particularly concerned with the ethics of literature—that is, with literature's potential engagement with questions of difference, otherness, and strangeness—Gray underscores the failures of most 9/11 novels to move beyond “the preliminary stages of trauma” by doing more than simply “registering that something traumatic … has happened.” A central problem, as Gray convincingly demonstrates, is that while American novelists have, along with all manner of pundits, announced the dawn of a new era following the attacks on New York and Washington D.C., the form of their works does not bear witness to fundamental change; rather, these works “assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures.” Gray does not argue for a full break or discontinuity between the pre- and post-9/11 worlds—indeed, he repeatedly and brilliantly finds literary antecedents for current concerns. Instead, acknowledging that our moment combines novelty and continuity, he stresses the need for what Bakhtin would call a “radical reaccentuation” of given forms: “some kind of alteration of imaginative structures is required to register the contemporary crisis,” as is “the ability and willingness imaginatively to act on that recognition.”

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