The heated debates in 2010 surrounding the proposed development of the Park51 complex, an Islamic cultural centre two blocks from the site of “Ground Zero,” which overshadowed the ninth-anniversary commemorations of the events of 9/11, have resonated with the idea that Ground Zero is hallowed or sacred ground and the proximity of a mosque is sacrilegious. The discourse of consecration has accompanied a process of reterritorialization, of a demarcation of the American “homeland” against incursion that was intensified if not inaugurated by the events of 9/11. The conceptualization of Ground Zero and the homeland are bound to the homogenization of space (or at least to the perception of homogeneous space) and of American life. David Simpson notes that the notion of sacred ground has its foundations in the scarcity of bodies and body parts recovered from the site. The remains that were recovered attained something like the status of relics; what remained, as part of the fabric of a ruined landscape, provided the material to anchor or embody a providential narrative of national destiny, incorporating place and the lives lost there.Footnote 1 Simpson argues that the “Portraits of Grief” series run by the New York Times was a corollary of sacred ground, an obituary-like discourse that compensated for the lack of recoverable bodies in fleshing out, in a universalizing way, narratives of familial, civic-minded, achieving or aspirational lives curtailed by the events of 9/11 but which nonetheless testified to the rude health of the nation, the economic and social opportunities it afforded, no matter the actual complexities of those lives as they were lived; their varying roles in the economy and social statuses; their religious, ethnic and racial identities. That those lives would have ended in agony with thoughts of nation far from mind has not, according to Simpson, stopped their recruitment for ideological service.Footnote 2 Following the killing of Osama bin Laden, gatherings at Ground Zero have confirmed the hallowed status of this ground and the redemptive narrative of nation and nationalized life grounded there, as did Barack Obama's wreath-laying there on 5 May 2011.Footnote 3
This essay begins by noting configurations of American space and the kinds of narrative they produce after 9/11 because cultural and particularly literary responses to 9/11 are often preoccupied with time rather than space, or, put otherwise, the time of trauma rather than the space of American territory. It is the experience of the temporality of traumatic time that often precludes the critical consideration of American territory. In the academic field of American studies, debate continues as to whether the trauma paradigm contributes to the scrutiny of American space and territory or whether narratives of trauma service the domestication and homogenization of that space identified by Simpson above. If the latter, there is what might be described as a discrepancy between what the following argument will define as the deterritorializing ambitions of American studies and the reterritorializing tendencies of American literary practice invested in the trauma paradigm. Mapping deterritorialization would entail, after Neil Campbell, a deconstruction of the way in which the national narrative, particularly from Manifest Destiny onwards, sought to produce a nation whose “interior” absorbed the “world” into its project, revealing that the “inward-looking” language of “settlement, rootedness and closure,” which articulated the certainties of interiority, was in fact working against a threatening exteriority, and disclosing that the national narrative has elided the fact of American space as having a “global dimension as a geographical, cultural and economic crossroads defined by complex connectivity, multidimensionality, and imagination.”Footnote 4 Working through critical debates on the possibilities of the trauma paradigm, and literary examples of the deployment of trauma, ultimately focussing on Don DeLillo's Falling Man and Cormac McCarthy's post-9/11 allegory The Road, this essay seeks a productive relation between time and space that maps a deterritorialized America.
To begin with, a working definition of trauma is needed, along with a better sense of the debates on the use of the trauma paradigm. In rationalizing the significance of the disruptive narrative strategies of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Mitchum Huehls argues that the aesthetic response to the traumatic rift between time and consciousness post-9/11 – the experience of the event disrupts witnessing, cognition and remembrance, and is, therefore, belated; and in the belatedness of the event, its intrusion in the present moment, it cannot be relegated to the past and threatens to disrupt the future – must catch up with and work through this timelag, “in time,” producing a temporalized knowledge. This fidelity to the experience of time has political import in relation to the Bush administration's post-9/11 foreign policy and accompanying rhetoric. As Bush stated in his address of 14 September 2001, the “conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at an hour, of our choosing.” So, argues Huehls, the war on terror was in effect a means to control time through the tactics of preemption: the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the curtailment of civil liberties under the Patriot Act, and the placing of detainees beyond established national and international law in Guantánamo Bay. Preemption was an attempt to determine the future before it has happened; in other words, to reinstall a national destiny (or, rather, teleology). While Huehls argues that the Cold War could be described in spatial metaphors (“dominos, walls, and curtains”), the war on terror could be described temporally.Footnote 5 The temporality of trauma would also counter the preemptive logic identified by Barbara Biesecker in the the Bush administration's rhetoric, or rather would counter the administration's cooption of traumatic loss. Such rhetoric constructed a collective melancholy for a national ideal that was threatened by terrorism but which did not exist in the first place. The ideal is one of democracy and can be found in, for example, Bush's Congressional statement of 20 September 2001: “‘Americans are asking, why do they hate us? … They hate our freedoms … These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.”Footnote 6 Noting America's history of exceptions to the democracy its exceptionalist discourse idealizes, Biesecker argues that such a melancholy rhetoric engenders a hallucinatory state in which the material causes and realities of war have been dematerialized. Put another way, the effect has been to see evidence of terrorism where there was not any. As the sense of loss has been both indeterminate and overdetermined, rhetorically unanchored from material reality, it has been mobilized to anticipate and accommodate more in the way of spectral threats to the idealized lost object. In other words, the rhetoric of melancholy is future-orientated – a “clarion call to pre-emptive arms” – because 9/11 will continue to haunt threateningly from the future not the past, leaving “no time for mourning” or the attainment of critical distance on what has and has not been lost.Footnote 7
While Biesecker is concerned about the claims from the future of a national melancholy for a perceived traumatic loss, and Huehls sees the time of trauma as constituting an alternative narrative to nationalist teleologies, trauma could be more productively seen as an affective means by which the remembrance of national wounding also recalls the international dimensions of the history of 9/11 and its aftermath. In other words, the culture of the war on terror needs to be thought of both temporally and spatially, to reveal trauma's territorializing and deterritorializing uses. Michael Rothberg finds in trauma literature the potential of an active form of spectatorship that engages with “cognitive and affective registers” of extreme violence where both terrorism and the war on terror have attempted to divorce “thinking and feeling.”Footnote 8 Simpson, in a related argument, advocates that post-9/11 memorial culture confronts the “material nature of violent death … the fate of the body when it no longer offers tenure to a recognizable social subject.”Footnote 9 That confrontation is important because “if we cannot think about how we die, there is no place to start to think seriously about the deaths of those faraway others we seem willing enough to both bring about and to supervise.”Footnote 10 To represent death at home allows a scrutiny of death abroad in the name of home. In Rothberg's terms, the affective dimension of the subjective experience of such a confrontation can be a means of encountering a global history of wounding.Footnote 11
Debating the deterritorializing potential Rothberg finds in trauma, Richard Gray argues that the problem with post-9/11 American literature can be found in its fixation on trauma; the events of that day and their aftermath are domesticated and familiarized (familialized), belying the cultural consensus of their rupturing effects and affectiveness. Paradoxically, the traumatic is contained, leading to social and cultural, if not historical, continuity. The trauma paradigm is domesticating because, on the one hand, literature – and Gray has DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) in mind – is unable to move beyond the traumatic symptom: “What we are left with is symptom: in this case the registering that something traumatic – perhaps too dreadful for words, unsusceptible as yet to understanding – has happened.”Footnote 12 The novel (DeLillo's) does not just demonstrate symptoms, in its stylistic numbness it is symptomatic. (I take issue with this reading of DeLillo's style but for now note the critical complaint.) As Rothberg might put it, the novel is unable to move from feeling to cognition, or from affect to historicization, from the local to the global. On the other hand, in literature traumatic affect reverberates in the domestic sphere, where it is worked through but also transvaluated into a source of continuity rather than rupture with what went before. So, to take another example, Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children (2006) may acknowledge rupture
but it does not enact it. The irony is that, relying on a familiar romance pattern … books like this, and, for that matter, [Jay] McInerney's The Good Life, [Ken Kalfus's] A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, and Falling Man, simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures. The crisis is, in every sense of the word, domesticated. “All life had become public,” that observation made by the central character in Falling Man, is not underwritten by the novel in which it occurs, nor in any of these novels. On the contrary, all life here is personal; cataclysmic public events are measured purely and simply in terms of their impact on the emotional entanglements of their protagonists … turning national and international history into … a sentimental education.Footnote 13
Gray is right to be cautious about the trauma paradigm, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz's novel The Writing on the Wall (2005) is certainly grist for Gray's critical mill, and indeed Rothberg's. The theme of this novel – translation – delivers not a globalized sense of post-9/11, but rather the translation of everything into American terms. Renata, working as a translator at the New York Public Library, finds constant, grammatical and rhetorical fault in political discourse, particularly Bush's post-9/11 speeches that pepper the novel and provide a media backdrop to the novel's unfolding plot. Renata finds that discourse “butchery,” “an assault on common language,”Footnote 14 and follows the Socratean notion that “‘bad language is evil and infects the soul with evil’” (51–52). So the novel more than implies that the political discourse of the Bush administration renders the events of 9/11 and post-9/11 illegible (5, 75). The Bush administration's violent instrumentalization of language to orchestrate national grief is a far cry from the nuanced expressions of loss Renata finds in the marginalized and forgotten languages she specializes in translating: Etinoi (43), Bliondan (7), for example. That she realizes the material effects and power of discourse – “Words are dangerous. Once something is in words, it's in the world, in the common language. It's registered in history” (158) – adds an unintentional irony to Schwartz's orchestration of trauma, as 9/11 is rescripted or reinscribed in very domestic terms and not translated into a transnational narrative Renata's work might enable (particularly as she starts to learn Arabic) and figure. That domestication concerns the way in which the missing posters of the victims of 9/11 evoke for Renata the way in which her sister, Claudia, went missing years before, probably killed by her uncle, Peter, with whom she had an underage affair and with whom she had a daughter, Gianna. For Gray and Rothberg this turn of events would mark the novel's failure to realize the transnational potential identified in the way that the missing posters momentarily evoke the desaparecidos (the disappeared of Latin America) and the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem (147), and therefore transnational analogies of mourning, political violence, and contested territory.Footnote 15 With the public sphere corrupted by the Bush administration's discourse of national grief, acts of remembrance around these images signal an attempt to reclaim the public sphere through private acts of mourning, resonant of, for Schwartz and her protagonist, mournful reclamations in Jerusalem and Latin America. However, in the novel these photographic images (posters) so configured quickly lose their political charge, and can only offer this one glimpse of the transnational, as they are folded back into family history and a sequence of domestic traumas, the recollection of which they inform. After Claudia's death, her father's subsequent suicide and her mother's mental collapse, Renata is left to care for Gianna. However, Gianna disappeared from a playground, probably kidnapped and trafficked by Peter. Years later, in the aftermath of 9/11, Renata, looking at missing posters, stumbles across a teenager who might or might not be Gianna, who might possibly recognize her but is nonetheless disorientated, shocked and rendered speechless by recent events (163–64). “Gianna” herself is the subject of a missing poster, which, when seen by Renata, recalls the shock of seeing her sister's recovered drowned body (257–58), but which also forces Renata to return her to her (it turns out) adoptive parents. (Renata does not reveal her suspicions of “Gianna's” true identity and past to the girl's parents (276–77).) Just as DNA testing allows victims to be identified from the traces found of them at Ground Zero, so Renata treasures the traces “Gianna” leaves in her apartment (278–79). 9/11 collapses past and present – “pieces of past and present jostle roughly; time has unhooked from its moorings” (103) – but also allows Renata to come to terms with the death of her sister and possible death of her niece all those years ago. The novel ends with the reconciliation of Renata and boyfriend Jack – Renata's obsession over “Gianna” had driven him away – and her conclusion (in Arabic) to him that “‘Nothing can be the way it was’.” That the statement is made in Arabic compounds the irony of the novel's parochial translation of 9/11. Jack mistakes her statement as a reflection on the Arab world's opinion of 9/11; however, Arabic has become for her the language of romance, not of global politics:Footnote 16 “‘You mean the world can never be the same? Is that what they're saying over there. That's what they say here, too. But, really, we have no perspective yet’ … [but Renata] ‘wasn't thinking on a global scale’” (283).
Reynolds Price's novel of 2005, The Good Priest's Son, also makes historicist gestures, venturing to use the trauma of 9/11 to illuminate the failure of democratic ideals at home and abroad. Mabry, an art dealer, seeks sanctuary from Manhattan in North Carolina after the attacks of 9/11, in the house of his ailing father, Tasker. Mabry more than likely has multiple sclerosis, is awaiting a final diagnosis and is contemplating his demise as he contemplates his father's mortality. In Mabry's possession is a painting by Philip Adger, which was painted beside Vincent van Gogh, on the evening of 27 July 1890, the evening of Van Gogh's suicide. However, Mabry comes to realize that the painting might well be superimposed on a Van Gogh sketch. (Mabry had bought the painting from a relative of Adger's, on behalf of his client Baxter Sample, who died in the attacks.) Artworks, then, in this novel, are associated with death, and are cultural artefacts that remain after death. Mabry's sojourn in the South offers promising opportunities to put the events of 9/11 in a larger historical context. As Tasker states, the death toll of 9/11 pales in comparison to the failure of American exceptionalism to prevent humanitarian crises around the world and the human costs of slavery and its legacy at home.Footnote 17 With the provocation of this kind of historical consciousness, Mabry ponders his own family's implication in slavery. Tasker is nursed in his old age by the much younger Audrey, suspected at one point of being Tasker's lover. Audrey is also the descendant of his grandmother's cook, a black woman probably born before emancipation (7, 8, 274). That Mabry's family is still dependent on black labour is tainted by a longer history of labour, the family's guilt over which is discharged by Tasker's bequeathal, on his deathbed, of his house to Audrey (259). The connotations of that act are reparative. Mabry confirms the gesture to Audrey by saying that it is a gift to her antebellum ancestor (269). The evocation of slavery is rather redemptive, but the challenge to the discourse of American exceptionalism and democratic ideals in the aftermath of 9/11 is still pertinent. Indeed, the motif of portraiture is part of the challenge. Audrey's son, Marcus, who seeks Mabry's tutelage in art, gives his tutor a painting of themselves that, in its photographical style, looks rather like a “wanted” poster (138), but what is wanted here? Confirmation of a familial relationship between Marcus and Mabry (they may be half-brothers) and therefore confirmation of an intimacy between two families that began with slavery: a historical relationship that remains somewhat fugitive and illicit in the present of the novel? “Wanted” also suggests the not-so-fugitive subjects of the missing posters that daubed Manhattan at the time. So the victims of 9/11 figure other histories, but the novel ultimately forecloses this subtle exploration of American history. The novel concludes with Mabry's contemplation of whether he will die alone of his illness, a death that would resonate with Van Gogh's solitary life (278), the motif with which the novel begins. Death becomes ahistorical and a matter of a rather tragic history of art, and portraiture the subject of universalized truths about life – as in Mabry's reflective reading of his favourite portrait hanging at the Frick Museum: “You're no more lonely than any man or woman. Women's lives are tragic because they can seldom succeed in ceasing to love their children. Men's are lonely because they seldom truly love” (229). The visual portraiture that permeates the novel follows the logic of the verbal portraiture of the “Portraits of Grief” series that Simpson finds so dehistoricizing. The way that the traumatic history of slavery might quietly resonate in the trauma of 9/11 gives way to trauma rendered in terms of personal tragedy with universal rather than historical resonances.
While these literary examples demonstrate the parochializing tendencies that Gray has found elsewhere in his critique of the way the trauma paradigm is deployed in post-9/11 fiction, it is worth noting that Gray's own literary examples do not necessarily fit his understanding of that paradigm. He understates the satire of Messud's novel in which the events of 11 September can only be reflected in the narcissism of its characters. For example, for Danielle the events of that morning, which she witnesses from afar (her apartment window and the television), mark the end an affair, as her lover is compelled to return home to his wife, and the realization that 10 September was the last night they would share together – and that is the real source of her trauma.Footnote 18 That such narcissism is offered by the narrator in sincere fashion (albeit focalized) beggars the reader's belief. Such self-indulgence is surely served up to the reader for the purposes of critique, making the novel's domestication of trauma parodic. Aspects of Kalfus's novel are also overlooked. Yes, 11 September becomes an extended metaphor for the prolonged divorce of Joyce and Marshall, but the novel's conclusion demands consideration. The novel ends with the capture of Osama bin Laden, peace between Israel and the PLO and an agreement to “share sovereignty in Jerusalem,” and the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (the novel was published before that actually happened), but also successful governance of the country with the support of Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. Not only that, there is also the hint that Joyce and Marshall may reunite. This allohistory is celebrated in a spontaneous party in the streets of New York. However, the narrator notes that the “moment would last forever; or until everything contained within it was completely destroyed.”Footnote 19 The impermanence of this escape from history into fantasy surely casts doubt over the way in which the history of 9/11 has been rendered in domestic terms.
Where Gray might argue that the numbed and numbing tone of Falling Man (2007) is symptomatic of a trauma spreading culturally from primary witnesses of the attacks on the World Trade Center to its secondary witnesses who witness via the event's mediatization, and to the author and his text, I would argue that the novel's scenes of numbing banality stage attempts to reinhabit a landscape rendered uncanny.Footnote 20 In other words, the trauma paradigm here may be reterritorializing but the literary labour entailed in that process betrays itself, acknowledging that the deterroritorialization has already occurred, and that Rothberg's affective bridge between the local and the global has been crossed. In the novel, New York, for Keith Neudecker, is made an extraordinary place by the attacks. As Keith emerges from the Twin Towers before their collapse, the narrator notes, “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.”Footnote 21 These are indeed “the days after. Everything now is measured by after” (138). Keith (and the novel) find it difficult to reconcile the times of before and after, that normality and abnormality should occupy the same urban space. For example, the sight of a rider on horseback heading toward a bridle path in Central Park “was something that belonged to another landscape … only half-believed in the seeing, [as in] when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, stone, wind, simple words, lost in the falling ash (103).” Towards the end of the novel, Keith, turned professional gambler, reverts, ostensibly, to acting out once-familiar routines – a desperate regression to the time of before: “He was fitting into something that was made to his shape … These were the times when there was nothing outside, no flash of history or memory that might be unknowingly summoned in the routine run of cards” (225). A different emphasis can be placed on these scenes than their staging of a melancholy fixation, which excludes history, on lost ordinariness. Keith may be anxious at the intrusion of involuntary memory, such are the aftereffects (affect) of witnessing trauma, but he is also attempting to reinhabit the quotidian, to root himself in a landscape (to be part of its physicality) that has been made strange by trauma. That these gambling scenes take place in Las Vegas, punctuated by occasional drives into the desert to view the city from afar, recalls the historical significance of making Western space coherent, legible, settled and part of a national narrative of Manifest Destiny that quietly echoes in the symbolism of Keith's actions (226).
As Hammad's hijacked plane crashes into the tower that houses Keith and his friend Rumsey who will die in the attack, as one narrative trajectory, that of the terrorist's perspective, collides with another, Keith's world is defamiliarized at the moment of the attack:
A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he [Hammad] watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and watched it spin more quickly and 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 the wall. (239)
This narrative collision, staged at the level of syntax, although it comes near the end of the novel, prefaces the scene (of Keith's escape from the towers) with which the novel begins. Despite the convoluted temporality of the novel (faithful to trauma's disruption of witnessing and deferral of remembrance and cognition), it stages an insistence on the strict demarcation of a time before and afterwards, decoupling the homely from the unhomely. For DeLillo, terror intrudes on what has been perceived as a pristine homeland but the mnemonic labour of remembering the ordinary is conspicuous and betrays itself.
Peter Boxall argues that traumatic temporality, in its deferral of historical meaning, allows DeLillo to suspend, momentarily, the post-9/11 fall into America's organization of the world into homeland and that which threatens it from without, into ways of being in the world ideologically restricted to “us” and “them.”Footnote 22 Trauma, then, sustains critical distance of certain processes of globalization. In short, Boxall's reading of DeLillo identifies the resonances of Jean Baudrillard's theory of terrorism in DeLillo's work. Baudrillard argues, for example, that terrorist attack and the war on terror and terrorism constitute “a fractal, cellular war.”Footnote 23 Put differently, this is an autoimmune war in which the system is attacking parts of itself it does not recognize. In that sense, the collapsing towers and the terrorists were in suicidal “complicity” (405), in a globalized system that can only consume (destroy) itself because it has no outside and so is inherently self-destructive as it nears perfection. The act of terrorism is the “restitution” for the “singularities” subsumed by a “world circulation,” a “generalized system of exchange,” an avenging gesture that is simply a “transference” of the system (405–6). There is no clash of civilizations, religions, regions, ideologies, or good and evil in the war on terror and terrorism, but rather an “internal” fracture (406).Footnote 24
Jess Walter's novel The Zero (2006) demonstrates perfectly Baudrillard's theorization of 9/11.Footnote 25 A survivor of the attack on the World Trade Center, police officer Brian Remy is seconded to the “Documentation Department,” a subdivision of a satirized Department of Homeland Security (55). In this novel, as in actuality, there was more in the way of paper than human remains at Ground Zero. However, the recovery of a record of commerce is also an evidentiary paper trail that Remy is encouraged to follow, under the jurisdiction of an increasingly corporatized government agency, in order to track down terrorist cells in the US. The ensuing narrative is punctuated or rather disrupted by a series of narrative shifts, marked by Remy's shifts in consciousness as he suffers from episodes of short-term memory loss and increasingly lives in a series of discrete moments. This, together with the fact of his disintegrating eyesight (a condition that preexisted 9/11 but which is getting progressively worse since), suggests a form of post-traumatic stress disorder: broadly speaking, a failure to witness, remember and make narrative sense of 9/11 and its aftermath. In actuality, Remy's life is already emplotted in a state-orchestrated narrative that subsumes everything in its path in the location, indeed fabrication, of a terrorist cell. The atomized moments in which he lives are as interconnected by that narrative as the burnt, random and detrital paper fragments recovered from Ground Zero, in which the Department of Documentation finds nonsensical significance: “inevitability and randomness patterns, assuming unreversed trajectories and nonpreferred directionality” (178). Ultimately this trail leads Remy and his associates to a terrorist cell that it turns out has been orchestrated and funded by Remy in the first place in the hope of ensnaring a genuine threat to homeland security (270–73, 290, 293). It is Remy who is therefore ultimately responsible for engendering a terrorist attack at Penn Station, which for Remy is traumatic repetition of 9/11. His experience of the unfolding attack is mediated by his memories of 9/11:
The crowds thinned and Remy ran across the terminal toward the ticket windows … (emerging into the empty plaza … white paper and smoking pieces of steel and bodies … and for the briefest moment he was alone, paper falling … he'd never heard the city so quiet … and then: a deep, low moan. (318)
Not so much traumatic repetition but a systematic replication of the event, as the leader of the cell, who triggers the bomb, says to Remy, the terrorist plot has a “zero sum” logic that can be neither negated nor exceeded, with “gains and losses coming out equal,” “No possible outcome except more of the same …” (310–11).
Read alongside DeLillo's novel, Walter's literary rendition of Baudrillard's theory suggests that trauma might introduce a dialectical understanding of violence and terror that may undermine the distinction between “us” and “them,” that reveals the dependency of “us” on configurations of “them.”Footnote 26 But, ultimately, is such an understanding of globalization too totalizing? The problem with this understanding is that globalization is synonymous with Americanization: America is not revealed as a transnational space and the global is cast in the nation's image. As Simpson, stressing the dialectical uses of theories such as Baudrillard's, inadvertently puts it,
Every imagining of the other is an encounter with the self: they are us . The phantasm of international terror – everywhere and always, unseen and ready to strike – is the reflection of global capitalism; the fundamentalism of Islamic radicals is the fruit of modernization, not of primitive tradition … [T]he image and the agent of the crisis in globalization, was and is the United States.Footnote 27
For Simpson and Baudrillard, histories of terrorism, as illustrated by Walter's novel, begin and end with the US.
How, then, can trauma historicize American space, revealing the histories that belie and deterritorialize the homeland? Attention to operations of fantasy that attend the traumatic may reveal a more productive version of trauma. As Susannah Radstone has argued, in dominant models of trauma, traumatic events “short-circuit the mind's and the culture's (defensive) sense-making capacities. Instead of passing through processes of narrativization and memory making, they pierce those defenses, lodging in the mind or the culture as the shrapnel of traumatic symptomatology.” The traumatic event, not fully experienced, witnessed or remembered, may be belatedly acknowledged if not fully known. “This is a theory that proposes a passive, acted-upon victim or culture. The traumatized individual or group has played no part in shaping their experience; they have simply been overwhelmed by the unexperienced” happening. According to this version of trauma, “the impact of catastrophic events closes down free association: that creative process through which experience, memory, and fantasy are woven into the texture of a life – or a culture.” Indeed, an
event may prove traumatic, indeed not because of its inherently shocking nature but due to the unbearable or forbidden fantasies that it prompts. Or, conversely, an event's traumatic impact may be linked to its puncturing of a fantasy that had previously sustained a sense of identity – national as well as individual.Footnote 28
As Donald Pease has noted, the Bush administration evoked national fantasies of virgin land and historical innocence (the staples of the discourses of colonialism and Manifest Destiny), particularly in Bush's address to the nation on 20 September 2001 in which he stated that America had not been attacked on its own soil for 136 years, with the exception of Pearl Harbor in 1941. In the colonial and nineteenth-century imagination, innocence of the forcible dispossession of indigenous peoples from their lands was sustained by the conversion of that land into virgin territory that could not be violated and that, putatively empty (evacuated), must be settled. To adapt the national fantasy of inviolable and virgin territory to the violations of the homeland of 9/11 was an avowal and disavowal of the primal trauma upon which the national identity rests, in effect a cultural recollection of a dispossession twenty-first-century Americans now perceive themselves to reenact but which threatens the fantasy of innocence. As Pease puts it, the idea of the violation of homeland brings that primal trauma into “spectacular visibility.” In fact, the conversion of inviolable virgin land to violated homeland generates a whole series of “uncanny” effects, as other territorial dispossessions concealed by the national fantasies of historical innocence have become resonant if not visible in the post-9/11 feeling of loss of homeland, and which are now “weirdly familiar” experiences: “the sites of residence of the Paiutes and Shoshones had become sites of nuclear waste dumping; the crumbling Twin Towers recalled the fire-bombing of civilian populations of Dresden and Tokyo, and the atomic bombing and fallout of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
However, the foundational dispossession was brought into “quasi-apocalyptic visibility” elsewhere, as in, for example, “Shock and Awe” in Iraq. The dispossession of other peoples from their lands became the means by which Americans could reoccupy their own land from which they had been dislocated by the attacks of 9/11 – a promised return to a land always already (and destined to be) theirs – in what was tantamount to a reworking of Manifest Destiny. The perception of a violated homeland and dispossession from it was in fact accompanied by the reality of suspension of civil liberties in an “emergency state” inaugurated by the Patriot Act, which dislocated Americans from “the nation as a shared form of life.” So a violation of the rights of citizens of other states deemed a threat to the homeland coincided with the abridgement of civil rights at home. Or, put another way, civil liberties, along with substraction from civic and political life (the production of vulnerable biologized life) were exchanged for the enjoyment of a mediatized spectacle of violation elsewhere (of life reduced to “carnality”). The dissemination of photographs taken at Abu Ghraib in 2004 encouraged an American spectatorial public to begin to refuse to take scopic pleasure in a foundational trauma transferred elsewhere that at the same time offered symbolic compensation for their own vulnerable, biologized lives. The photographs of Abu Ghraib revealed “the Homeland Security State as the cause of the trauma it purported to oppose,” turning the “spectatorial gaze inward.”Footnote 29
In sum, then, the conscription of the trauma of 9/11 for hegemonic purposes revealed a whole series of traumas elsewhere: foundational traumas of the dispossession of indigenous populations of their homelands; atrocities of the Second World War; the current trauma of American biologized life; carnal life in Afghanistan and Iraq (particularly Abu Ghraib), not to mention Guantánamo Bay – all of which could no longer be contained by national fantasies of virgin land, historical innocence, inviolability, and democratic exceptionalism; all of which traumatic in the present because rendered visible by the failures of national fantasy.
It is to Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road (2006),Footnote 30 that this essay turns, by way of conclusion, to think through the relationship between trauma, fantasy and territory in literary terms. To read this post-apocalyptic dystopian narrative as an allegory of 9/11 implies the traumatic.Footnote 31 The incantatory nature of the novel's narrative voice, as many critics have pointed out, is a desperate attempt to resurrect the world in redemptive symbolic terms – of “good guys” who “carry the fire,” namely the father and son, versus the “bad guys,” the cannibalistic gangs who terrorize the road – belied by the meaninglessness of the world and its disintegration, the collapse of language, and the death of signification. The narrator, whose voice sometimes seems to belong to the father, and is sometimes omniscient, laments the “world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion … The sacred idiom shorn of its reference and so of its reality … In time to wink out forever” (93). Yet, as Gray argues, this novel is neither redemptive nor nihilistic, but somewhere in between, caught in the death throes of language and meaning – and in a Beckettian paradox in which to write the evacuation of language of its meaning actually buttresses the linguistic construction of meaning – actually adds meaning.Footnote 32 That is certainly akin to Amy Hungerford's sense of the novel, in which its biblical inflection – the litanous style of the narrative, the narrator's lament that language has been shorn of its sacred (Adamic) possibility of bringing things into being, and incantatory attempt to resurrect a dying world – is a religious assertion of meaninglessness. Hungerford describes this as the secular religiosity of modernism: a return to the modernist concern for textuality and artifice by which the world could be precariously held together as text.Footnote 33
The narrative ends with the father's death and the boy's rescue by another familial group, which we hope has not lapsed into cannibalism. The novel's end suggests the messianic meaning of the boy's survival, with which the father had invested his son – an investment continued by the maternal figure in the adoptive family that rescues him: “She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time” (306). Yet the novel's real resurrection is linguistic and found its closing paragraph:
Once there was a brook stream in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (306–7)
This is not a vision of an Emersonian analogy between material and Transcendent(al) worlds; nor is this a pastoral vision that resonates with the father's (possibly southern) memory of fishing with his uncle and in harmony with the surrounding natural world that is recalled earlier in the novel.Footnote 34 Such readings would render the meaning of American territory in rather overdetermined, indeed metaphysical and ultimately redemptive, terms, terms akin to those articulated by providential narrative. As the narrator states, the space crossed in this novel can no longer be tenanted with such narratives: “The day is providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later” (56). Rather, the “hum” of meaning suggests the inarticulacy of language, but also an immanence of a world of meaning which resonates in language, and for Gray this is an appropriate modulation of the trauma of 9/11: a registration of its disruption to representation but not the absolute paralysis of historical meaning.Footnote 35 The question remains: what historical meaning?
If in the novel the idea of providence – the idea of history as progress and the progressive organization (and homogenization) of American space – is untenable, then what is staged in its place is a concertina of time as different historical memories occupy the same space. Where trauma has been argued to produce a rupture between past and present, because of the unprecedented nature of the event, McCarthy's post-apocalyptic, post-traumatic landscape is suffused with memory. Spatial acts (crossing, occupying space) are memorative acts, as in the father's visit to his childhood home (25–26), and on the occasions when, exploring ground or interiors and in a memorative frame of mind, he is conscious that he has overlooked something, something that would have been conspicuous in the pre-apocalyptic world and its landscape (141, 255). Historical consciousness is also regional. The idea of the South still endures in this novel, despite the father's statement that there are no more “states” although they follow “state roads” (43) and the narrator's statement that the post-apocalyptic world is also a post-ideological world: “Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it” (28). However, the father's historical memory remains, it seems, intact. He brings a memorative perspective to what he surveys, including the plantation house that father and son encounter: “He held the boy's hand and they crossed the porch. Chattel slaves had once trod those boards bearing food and drink on silver trays” (113). It is difficult to tell whether this is the father's or the narrator's historical consciousness at work, but, more to the point, imprisoned in the basement of this building is a living supply of food for the cannibals who live there (116). The historical reference to plantation slavery frames the post-apocalyptic exploitation of bodies – and enslavement is witnessed elsewhere in the novel by father and son in the procession of an army on the road (96). Despite the father's fears over the precariousness of memory – his ambivalence towards acts of remembrance, particularly the remembrance of his wife (“He thought each memory recalled must do something violent to its origins”); the progressive amnesia brought on by the disappearance of things to which memory refers (“He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.”); the struggle against amnesia (“Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.”) – memory pertains. It in fact permeates this novel, whether it is personal or social (as in the memory of slavery), or traumatic, intrusive and haunting as in the sight of the corpses (“You forget what you want to remember and remember what you don't want to forget”) (139, 17, 31, 11). Put otherwise, this post-apocalyptic landscape is not one of entropy, but it is irrepressibly uncanny.
In its spatialization of time, the novel reveals the historical contours and palimpsestic nature of territory. If, as Pease has argued, the trauma of 9/11 was conscripted to generate a sense of the homeland violated, but it in fact made visible a series of traumas that subtended fantasies of historical innocence and exceptionalist idealism, from colonialism and settlement to the production of biologized life in America and carnal life in American theatres of war, then that conscription served the attempted reterritorialization of American space but in fact contributed to its deterritorialization through its interrelation with transnational traumas. The Road has shown the way in which different times can occupy the same space, and so has allegorized not just the catastrophe of 9/11 but the way it recalls other traumas (slavery, for instance) and their challenge to national fantasies of historical innocence that demarcate the homeland and to the idea that trauma is defined by and limited to 9/11. If The Road can stage the way in which two times (traumas) occupy the same space, then it implies also that two spaces can occupy the same time; the spatialization of time is also the temporalization of space. The interrelation of national traumas implies also the interrelation of transnational traumas; crossing territory in this novel evokes the extraterritorial, the unhomely in the homely.
The question, though, remains whether national fantasies can ever really be dismantled. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, fantasy is both “disarming” and “disturbing” and “inadmissible into our reality”; in other words, constitutionally unstable, and in need of constant psychic labour that both shores up fantasy and reproduces its instabilities. If cracks in fantasy appear then the Real threatens to return but never as itself and always in another guise. It is precisely because the Real exceeds fantasy that we “cannot integrate it into (what we experience as) our reality and are therefore compelled to experience it as a nightmarish apparition.” Put otherwise: in order to sustain the possibility of the Real, fantasy must be sustained, not only because of our inability to integrate something so excessive but, I would add, because fantasy always already precedes the Real and is its enabling text, the fissures in which give rise to the possibility of the Real. So the Real itself, “in order to be sustained, has to be perceived as a nightmarish unreal spectre,” as another fantasy, and “we should be able to discern, in what we experience as fiction, the hard kernel of the Real which we are able to sustain only if we fictionalize it.” To fictionalize the Real as “fantasmatic spectre … guarantees the consistency of our symbolic edifice, thus enabling us to avoid confronting its constitutive inconsistency (‘antagonism’).”Footnote 36 Focusing on fantasmatic literary responses to 9/11 reveals and overcomes the constitutional antagonism of national fantasies of the homeland. That McCarthy delivers the historical complications of space in the form of an apocalyptic narrative suggests something of the persistent symbolic valence of national homeland after 9/11, belied and antagonized by the historically Real of territorial and extraterritorial trauma which, it seems, can only emerge as another fantasy.
