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Deterritorializing the “Homeland” in American Studies and American Fiction after 9/11

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2011

RICHARD CROWNSHAW
RICHARD CROWNSHAW
Affiliation:
Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Literary criticism has debated the usefulness of the trauma paradigm found in much post-9/11 fiction. Where critiqued, trauma is sometimes understood as a domesticating concept by which the events of 9/11 are incorporated into sentimental, familial dramas and romances with no purchase on the international significance of the terrorist attacks and the US's response to them; or, the concept of trauma is understood critically as the means by which the boundaries of a nation or “homeland” self-perceived as violated and victimized may be shored up, rendered impermeable – if that were possible. A counterversion of trauma argues its potential as an affective means of bridging the divide between a wounded US and global suffering. Understood in this way, the concept of trauma becomes the means by which the significance of 9/11 could be deterritorialized. While these versions of trauma, found in academic theory and literary practice, invoke the spatial – the domestic sphere, the homeland, the global – they tend to focus on the time of trauma rather than on the imbrication of the temporal and the spatial. If, instead, 9/11 trauma could be more productively defined as the puncturing of national fantasies of an inviolable and innocent homeland, fantasies which themselves rest on the (failed) repression of foundational violence in the colonial and settler creation of that homeland, and on subsequent notions of American exceptionalism at home and, in the exercise of foreign policy, abroad, then the traumatic can be spatialized. In other words, understood in relation to fantasy, trauma illuminates the terroritalization and deterritorialization of American history. After working through various examples of post-9/11 fiction to demonstrate parochial renditions of trauma and trauma's unrealized global resonances, this article turns to Cormac McCarthy's 9/11 allegory The Road for the way in which its spaces, places and territories are marked by inextricable traumas of the past and present – and therefore for the way in which it models trauma's relation to national fantasy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 4: 10 Years After 9/11 , November 2011 , pp. 757 - 776
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 As Patricia Yaeger would describe it, this is “detritus as a space that gathers corporeality, or rubble as a site where bodily trauma passes through.” Patricia Yaeger, “Rubble as Archive, or 9/11 as Dust, Debris and Bodily Vanishing,” in Judith Greenberg, ed., Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 190; David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 29–31.

2 Simpson, 36–8, 47–9.

3 See, for example, Mark Landler, “Obama Honors Victims of Bin Laden at Ground Zero,” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/us/politics/06obama.html?_r=1, last accessed 24 June 2011.

4 Neil Campbell, The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 3, 14.

5 Mitchum Huehls, “Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/11's Timely Traumas,” in Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, eds., Literature after 9/11 (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 44–46.

6 Quoted by Biesecker, Barbara, “No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 40, 1 (2007), 154CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Biesecker, 155, 157, 164. For a related argument about the ideological construction of the malleable and accommodating signifier of “9/11” and its political uses see Redfield, Marc, “Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11,” diacritics, 37, 1 (2007), 55–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Michael Rothberg, “Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and Private in Post-9/11 Literature,” in Keniston and Quinn, 124.

9 David Simpson, “Telling It Like It Isn't,” in Keniston and Quinn, 221–22.

10 Ibid., 221–2.

11 Rothberg, 125. See also Judith Butler's well-known argument that the national grief after 9/11 was a missed opportunity for transnational empathy, in Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 28, 29, 138–39, 131, 144. Rothberg has written a little more recently that “once writers have acknowledged the shock and trauma of 9/11, an intellectually and politically mature literature must leave national-domestic space behind for riskier ‘foreign’ encounters” in a “centrifugal literature of extraterritoriality” that “pivot[s] away from the homeland.” There is a slight change of emphasis here that suggests that trauma must be overcome before an extraterritorial literature can be written. The following is prompted by Rothberg's earlier understanding of trauma as a key to extraterritoriality. Rothberg, Michael, “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray,” American Literary History, 21, 1 2009, 152–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 157, 158.

12 Gray, Richard, “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis,” American Literary History, 21, 1 (2009), 132Google Scholar. Gray's argument is extended in his very recent After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), published just as this article was going to press.

13 Ibid., 134.

14 Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Writing on the Wall (New York: Counterpoint, 2005), 78. Subsequent page references are given in the text.

15 Gray, After the Fall, 31–2; Rothberg, “A Failure of the Imagination,” 154.

16 Rothberg, “A Failure of the Imagination,” 155; Gray, After the Fall, 32.

17 Reynolds Price, The Good Priest's Son (New York: Scribner, 2005), 43, 45, 123, 141. Subsequent page references are given in the text.

18 Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children (London: Picador, 2006), 501–2.

19 Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (London: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 234–37.

20 For a critical reading of the contagion of trauma see Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 47–48.

21 Don DeLillo, Falling Man (London: Picador, 2007), 3. Subsequent page references are given in the text.

22 Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 179–97.

23 Baudrillard, Jean, “L'esprit du terrorisme,” in Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, eds., Dissent from the Homeland, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 2 (2002), 407Google Scholar.

24 See also Frederic Jameson's “The Dialectics of Disaster,” in Hauerwas and Lentricchia, 297–304; and John Milbank, “Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror,” in ibid., 305–23.

25 Jess Walter, The Zero (New York: Regan, HarperCollins, 2006). Subsequent page references are given in the text.

26 Simpson, 9/11, 8–11.

27 Ibid., 136.

28 Susannah Radstone, “The War of the Fathers: Trauma, Fantasy, and September 11,” in Greenberg, Trauma at Home, 117–23.

29 Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minnesota and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2009), 155, 157–58, 160–61, 168–69, 170–71, 173–75, 178, 183.

30 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2007). Subsequent page references are given in the text.

31 On allegory's dislocation of historical reference see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osbourne (London: Verso, 1994), 36, 37.

32 Ibid., 139.

33 Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religions since 1960 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 136–37. Indeed, the style of this novel often foregrounds the conspicuous materiality of language. McCarthy's narrator is trying to reconstitute the world textually, through an exact language, paired down to the physical actions and residues that remain, correspondent with the materiality of the thing itself. See, for example, 126–27.

34 See Chris Walsh, “The Post-southern Sense of Place in The Road,” Cormac McCarthy Journal, 52–54, Tim Edwards, “The End of the Road: Pastoralism and the Post-apocalyptic Waste Land of Cormac McCarthy's The Road,” ibid., 55, 58, 59; and Wesley G. Morgan, “The Route and Roots of The Road,” ibid., 39–47; see also Kunsa, Ashley, “‘Maps of the World in Its Becoming’: Post-apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy's The Road,” Journal of Modern Literature, 33, 1 (2009), 57–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 62–63.

35 Gray, “Open Doors, Closed Minds,”139.

36 Slavov Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, 31–32.