Representing 9/11 : Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature, Film, and Television 9781442252684, 9781442252677

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Representing 9/11

Representing 9/11 Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature, Film, and Television

Edited by Paul Petrovic

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Representing 9/11 : trauma, ideology, and nationalism in literature, film, and television / edited by Paul Petrovic. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4422-5267-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4422-5268-4 (ebook) 1. American fiction--21st century--History and criticism. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in literature. 3. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in motion pictures. 4. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, on television. 5. Terrorism in literature. 6. Terrorism in motion pictures. 7. Terrorism on television. 8. Psychic trauma in literature. 9. Psychic trauma in motion pictures. 10. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001--Influence. I. Petrovic, Paul, 1982- editor. PS374.S445R47 2015 813'.6093587393--dc23 2015007298 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Emergent Trends in Post-9/11 Literature and Criticism Paul Petrovic I: Counterreactions against Realism 1

Jess Walter’s The Zero: Satirizing the “Desert of the Real” Marjorie Worthington

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Memorializing Post-9/11 New York in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City Jeffrey Severs

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“Never Give a Good Politician Time to Pray”: Stephen King’s Treatment of Political Power and Community Involvement in Under the Dome Tamara Watkins

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Which Came First, Zombies or the Plague?: Colson Whitehead’s Zone One as Post-9/11 Allegory Anne Canavan

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A Eulogy of the Urban Superhero: The Everyday Destruction of Space in the Superhero Film James N. Gilmore

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II: Perception, Ideology, and Community 6

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Paucity of Imagination: Stereotypes, Public Debates, and the Limits of Ideology in Amy Waldman’s The Submission Amir Khadem

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Strangers in a Homeland: Veterans and “Innocensus” in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and The Yellow Birds Damon Barta

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“Our New Customer Is the Bush Administration?”: Questioning Cultural Identity and Governmental Surveillance in Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector Paul Petrovic

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Contents

“I’m the Motherfucker Who Found This Place”: Locating Post–bin Laden America in Zero Dark Thirty Lloyd Isaac Vayo

10 From 24 to Homeland: The Shift in America’s Perception of Terrorism Deborah Pless III: Masculinity, Marginalization, Melancholy, and HyperProtection

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11 The Danger That Keeps Knocking: Representations of Post9/11 Masculinity in Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad Shana Kraynak

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12 Post-Closet and Post-9/11: The Bromantic Imagination of Disaster in This Is the End and I’m So Excited! Ken Feil

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13 The Human Barnyard: Rhetoric, Identification, and Symbolic Representation in Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana Elizabeth Lowry 14 The Pain and Prison of Post-9/11 Parenting in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom Megan Cannella 15 How to Get to 9/11: Teju Cole’s Melancholic Fiction Ariela Freedman 16 Poetic Responses to 9/11 and Adrienne Rich’s The School among the Ruins Lin Knutson IV: International Responses 17 “Some Sense of Bridge Making”: Exploring the Relationship between America and Pakistan in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Mira Nair’s Film Adaptation Laura Findlay 18 Haunting Cartographies: Mapping the Aftermath in Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st Danica van de Velde Index About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

I recognize and am thankful for the intellectual community that surrounded me at Northern Illinois University from 2007 to 2012. This collection owes much to those who guided me along the way. I extend special gratitude to James Giles, Tim Ryan, Scott Balcerzak, and Mark Van Wienen, who pushed my dissertation on post-9/11 literature into deeper and more problematic readings of nation and empire, from which this collection came into existence. I am grateful to Keith Gandal, Rob Sturr, Kevin Baker, Laurie Delaney, Leslie Heaphy, Pat Matko, and Annette Woods for encouraging my academic interest and inquisitiveness, and I extend my appreciation to all of the contributors in this collection, who exhibited professionalism and quality scholarship. Thanks to both Bob Batchelor and Stephen Ryan for their guidance of this collection and advice on the manuscript throughout its administrative stages. Thanks also to the Petrovic and Erickson households for providing patience, commitment, and love along the journey. Many early discussions, drafts, and detailed scholarship about post-9/11 culture received the editorial eye of Jeffrey A. Schooley. And this collection, and everything else, is dedicated daily to Sarah, who breathes and speaks love into my life.

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Introduction Emergent Trends in Post-9/11 Literature and Criticism Paul Petrovic

On July 27, 2014, the New York Times Sunday Book Review published the article “When It Comes to Fiction about National Tragedy, How Soon Is Too Soon?” This question is part of a weekly “Bookends” series where two writers consider a timely literary question, allowing them to springboard off of current events, in this case the downed flight of Malaysian Airlines MH17 by Russian forces. In his response, Daniel Mendelsohn draws upon post-9/11 fiction to decry what he sees as its frequently blinkered and constrained literary currency: In the best-known and most lauded treatments, we are almost always in the aftermath, and our attention is fixed almost exclusively on the survivors and their (often highly symbolic) personal struggles. . . . What has been strikingly absent—perhaps because it’s precisely what takes a longer time to apprehend—is a grander historical vision of the event: why it happened, what its implications are beyond the local and personal or, indeed, national. (BR31)

This contention—that post-9/11 fiction remains focused on the emotional and personal travails of its citizenry to the exclusion of a more expansive sociopolitical canvas—is itself a mistaken perception. In reality, contemporary post-9/11 fiction, television, and films have been expanding upon the initial responses to the national atrocity, reflecting shifts in governmental policy-making and the bureaucratic will to power, infractions perpetrated by the Department of Homeland Security, and connecting the events of 9/11 to earlier international atrocities executed by both the United States and the world. Mendelsohn, perhaps predictably, does not draw on this more recent tradition of post-9/11 media amid his fixed thesis. Indeed, the only piece of American literature that he draws upon to validate himself is Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), an early piece of post-9/11 fiction and one that critics have since identified as more significant nationally and politically than Mendelsohn’s dismissive take. 1 To expect a nearinstantaneous triangulation of national, political, and individual perspectives on 9/11 is imprudent little more than five years after the fact. As ix

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such, if the first wave of post-9/11 fiction occasionally silenced instances of political resistance and overly fetishized national victimhood, then the resultant post-9/11 media that have since proliferated under the latter years of the Bush and subsequent Obama administrations serve as a corrective to that era. Post-9/11 literary criticism has too often focused on a narrow set of texts and those text’s attendant concerns, principally those of trauma and recovery in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack. While this is a valid architecture of the themes generated from the initial fiction, post-9/ 11 literature has since splintered from this generally realist paradigm, refracting into matters of the fantastical, the allegorical, the ethnic, and the international. Likewise, contemporary post-9/11 literature situate the attack on September 11, 2001, within a wider sociohistorical context, denying the national exceptionalist rhetoric, to use Donald Pease’s terminology, that often overwhelmed the early texts and recording the contradictions of policy and culture that have been instituted in the decade since the attack. Thus, the aim of Representing 9/11: Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature, Film, and Television is to contemplate how emergent American and international texts expand upon and complicate the initial post-9/11 literary canon. For example, early post-9/11 criticism moved incrementally from a descriptive model of literary criticism to a prescriptive model, articulating an antipathy toward fiction that was not realist in tone. In doing so, critics standardized the belief, however unconsciously, that only realist texts could adequately cover the horror and terror of the day. Yet, precisely because so many observers labeled the terrorist attack as a surreal, if not hyperreal, experience, fantastical fiction especially offers an avenue of post-9/11 narrative recovery. This collection, then, corrects the implied biases and practices of the initial post-9/11 criticism, bringing to light how those texts that testify to the traumatic event of 9/11 within a satirical or allegorical framework can equally engage intelligently with America’s exceptionalist ideologies. While several monographs and collections of essays have charted the literary response to 9/11, those studies typically center on the first wave of post-9/11 texts and probe only the initial trauma of the terrorist attack and first responders. Richard Gray and Michael Rothberg, who charged these texts of possessing an insular political framework while codifying the victimhood and relational resolution of their characters, best characterize this scholarship. In particular, Rothberg decries those texts that “provide[] a perfectly ideological, imaginary solution to the political crisis” (154). A second wave of 9/11 fiction has come to the fore, however, and it more directly considers the multivalent forces of empire. What is valuable about this second wave that began circulating, after 2008 especially, is that it considers not just the seismic fallout from the Bush administration and presidency, where national exceptionalism became a formative piece of U.S. political ideology, but it also inaugurates a newfound

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imaginative space founded on deconstructing the national exceptionalist fantasy. In doing so, these texts imagine America through a more pluralistic and ambiguous lens. Other representational limitations dogged early post-9/11 criticism. Post-9/11 fiction authored by women has received curiously little critical attention. Kristiaan Versluys’s Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (2009), for example, comments on the nearly universal masculine response to 9/11 in American literature, and he himself places at the fore of his study works by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, and Frédéric Beigbeder. While Versluys alludes to Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005) and Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, he dismisses both, trivializing their worth with a mere footnote and contributing to the critical myopia by treating his subjective blindness as if it were an objective reality. He contends that the two women “have written important novels in which 9/11 figures as a plot element, but,” so he claims, “no American female or minority author has yet treated 9/11 as a central theme” (200). Versluys’s parameters for distinguishing between post-9/11 fiction and those that draw from 9/11 as a “plot element” are hazy at best, and he never clarifies the case after that notation, seemingly believing that neither women nor minorities had, as of 2009, privileged 9/11 as the locus for all of the narrative events that followed in a work. The ambivalence, if not outright condemnation, that should meet this rhetorical dismissal is implied, again, by the criticism that has gathered around Schwartz’s, Messud’s, and Helen Schulman’s novels. 2 Further, recent works by female writers such as Shaila Abdullah, Gish Jen, Allegra Goodman, Amy Waldman, Giannina Braschi, and Cara Hoffman continue to collapse the critical boundaries crudely imposed upon post-9/11 studies. The diversity of approaches inherent to the women’s writing mentioned above, and the way in which this collection performs close readings on women’s post-9/11 fiction, certifies the fact that 9/11 exists “as a central theme” in women’s writing. Trauma theory has also impacted post-9/11 studies from the beginning, with critical scholarship focusing on the immobilization of language on the imprinted memory of 9/11 survivors at a fundamental level. Trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Serene Jones, and Robert Jay Lifton, among others, guide these readings. For example, in Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre (2011), Véronique Bragard, Christophe Dony, and Warren Rosenberg assess how “trauma can impose a barrier between the imaginable and the expressible,” so that post9/11 texts “reflect upon the limits of language and literature when confronted with the overwhelming intensity of the 9/11 events” (7). This rhetorical and narrative paralysis, however, refers mostly to the formative era of post-9/11 studies, as does Portraying 9/11 as a whole. Rather than the stasis and dislocation generated from the first wave of post-9/11

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media, second-wave media both bears witness to and works through these issues. In turn, these contemporary texts work to recover from the marginalization of a resistant political ideology and thereby undercut the then-present matrix of innocence, consensus, and empire. Post-9/11 texts now draw on a multiplicity of cultural perspectives to better resist the fatalism and marginalization prevalent in mainstream American culture. For instance, Peter Boxall’s Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (2013) suggests that the ethical imperative seems, in one light, to be to find a form in which to give expression to a common humanity, a political subject that can weather the world-historical storm and can resist the call on all sides to violent fundamentalism. But what the twenty-first-century novel has repeatedly performed is the discovery that the expression of such commonality involves us in a recognition of its radical precariousness, that one must do violence to the languages and the forms which give us being, in order to continue the work of human living, to maintain faith with the “person in motion” who we are still in the process of becoming. (164)

Rather than instituting policies of national sovereignty or exceptionalism over others, Boxall emphasizes that humanity, and in turn literature, must understand the ways in which language is continually reshaped and reconfigured by world events. As meaning is reshaped, though, Boxall counsels that governments and individuals alike must not harbor fatalistic aggression at the provocateurs. The key for post-9/11 literature is to make legible, through the alchemy of aesthetics, the peril of identity and language and to use that peril so that it does not consume but instead transfigures. Since the publication of the early post-9/11 scholarship, the American soldier has emerged as a trend in post-9/11 fiction, with Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012), Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds (2012), Phil Klay’s 2014 National Book Award's winning Redeployment (2014), and Cara Hoffman’s Be Safe I Love You (2014) among them. These novels and story collections interrogate the rampant inadequacies of personnel, administrative policy measures, and psychic withdrawal. Klay’s story “Bodies” sums up the ironic sentiment that these texts wield, internalizing how “it was another three weeks before I got home and everybody thanked me for my service. Nobody seemed to know exactly what they were thanking me for” (63). Yet these texts that concentrate on the combatant in Iraq and back home exert their strongest ideological hold when they chart the Sisyphean struggle to sift out enemy from civilian, underscoring the difficulty it takes to bridge military training and have compassion for those who are caught in the crossfire due to geography rather than extremism. These texts emerge as the latest in a line of fiction analyzing the zero-sum game of war, adding to a literary line that ex-

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tends back to forbearers like Tim O’Brien, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway. Hoffman’s Be Safe I Love You is also a significant corrective to this growing canon of fiction about post-9/11 veterans. Many of these texts, including Powers’s, Fountain’s, and Klay’s, concentrate on traumatized men who face an American society indifferent to unpacking the complexities that bind soldiers to silence and thus reinforce the psychic barriers that lead to PTSD and other scarring psychological aftereffects. Hoffman’s work tackles these issues but imagines the veteran as a woman and, in doing so, exposes inadequacies that are particularly gendered. The burdens of being a deployed female soldier also carry concerns about safety from extremist militia as well as from her own command, and Hoffman’s novel pointedly records how Lauren Clay “had not been sexually assaulted or gotten pregnant on her tour” (41). Given the staggering numbers of sexual assault that confront women in the military, facts hauntingly reported in Kirby Dick’s documentary The Invisible War (2012), the fears of rape remain a frightening reality. Hoffman’s novel examines Lauren’s processes of disassociation and in turn chronicles how others cannot reconcile themselves with her internalized damage, until “she became silently furious with her father. With [her brother Danny’s] school. With PJ. With Exxon, Mobil, Shell, Halliburton. And then finally furious with herself, where the feeling found its home” (153). The wounds, psychic as well as visible, that these soldiers carry with them are all too often circumnavigated by a society that would sooner gloss over them. Thus, one of the great strengths of post-9/11 fiction focused on the troops is that these texts excavate what would otherwise remain buried. The fiction focused around American military operations in the Middle East aligns with the growing understanding of how symptomatic the bureaucratic malaise has been, with an American infrastructure that settles upon superficial fixes and headlines over the legitimate overhaul of a deteriorating system. These decisions in turn make visible the impracticality and, indeed, inaccessibility, of sustained recovery in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thomas E. Ricks’s Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006) records how the reconstruction and humanitarian operations in 2003 were uncoordinated, little more than “pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck” (204). The U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) sought to build democratic and economic control in Iraq, but they were nonetheless “understaffed and underbudgeted” (205). Ricks writes that the end result was a failure of security and internal communication, for the “CPA was ineptly organized and frequently incompetent, working badly not only with Iraqis and the media, but even with the U.S. military, its partner in the occupation” (205). As this fundamental damage becomes public across various media channels of dissemination, the resistance, if not outright hostility, toward military, bureaucratic, and governmental authority itself becomes transparent.

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For example, Kirk W. Johnson’s nonfiction account To Be a Friend Is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind (2013) records how both the Bush and Obama administrations exhibit an aversion to naturalizing those Iraqi allies who served as translators alongside the American occupation of their homeland. While a number of Christian Iraqi soldiers have been granted U.S. asylum and adopted into the American body politic, both administrations continue to show disregard toward Muslims who have reached out for asylum and are being hunted, summarily tortured, and executed by Iraqi extremists for their service to U.S. policies. Johnson details how American bureaucrats have washed their hands of these people, institutionalizing endless paperwork to jam the procedural process, and the fact that neither the Bush nor the Obama administration legitimizes these Iraqi men and women remains one of the most damning acts to come out of the War on Terror. As Johnson writes, We were in a spell of our own post-9/11 creation. When our government wanted to do something wrong, we accepted the exigencies of war and turned our backs on the moral choices of torture, extraordinary rendition, “black site” prisons, suspension of habeas corpus, unwarranted wiretapping, and unending drone warfare. We wanted there to be no constraints to do harm to other people if it might keep us safe. So the government swiftly cultivated a sophisticated ganglia of secret prisons throughout the world, contractors to assist in interrogations, a fleet of off-the-book airplanes to shuttle detainees to and from hostile countries. But when we ask our government to do something right or just, we accept every possible constraint it summons as an excuse for inaction. We accept that it takes the same government years to put an Iraqi interpreter—whose retinal scans, fingerprints, and polygraph results are all within our records—on an airplane and fly him to safety. (261)

Texts by and about veterans use language not to codify the psychological stasis around them, reflected in the first wave of post-9/11 literature, but to testify to the amoral if not criminal conduct endemic in American military and bureaucratic operations. Rather than reify the jingoism present in media relations issued by these corporations’ press corps, they embed their ideological critiques within a fictional record. One of the other recent trends is the attempt of immigrant fiction by Middle Eastern writers to contextualize themselves apart from the extremists even as they catalog how they have had to regulate their bodies so as to better assimilate into an American body politic now apprehensive about their ethnicity. Among others, Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams (2010), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced (2012), and Akhtar’s later The Who and the What (2014) chronicle how physical markers of difference, from veils to beards, are cast aside to combat a repressive America embracing Islamophobia. This literature also challenges and deconstructs paradigms of American exceptionalism,

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but by the same token, it questions fundamental tenets of Muslim culture and identity. In doing so, it seeks to bridge a gap between perceived dichotomies, between, as Boxall writes, the “commonality” and the “radical precariousness” of Muslims in American society. Post-9/11 media have finally moved past the recursive and continual meditation on the initial trauma of the terrorist attack. Representing 9/11 brings together a diverse collection of essays that complicate the limited representation of post-9/11 literature that currently exists. Broken up into four sections—counterreactions against realism; perception, ideology, and community; masculinity, marginalization, melancholy, and hyperprotection; and international responses—this collection analyzes not just the early nationalist exceptionalist attitude that was promulgated under President George W. Bush’s administration but records new ambivalences exhibited against President Obama in contemporary literature and media. That is, this collection does not merely bludgeon President Bush’s objectionable military and national security record in the wake of 9/11, but acknowledges that the rise of drone attacks and the military-industrial complex in the age of Obama are equally troubling. The first section, “Counterreactions against Realism,” focuses on those texts that draw on modes of satire, genre, and the fantastic to comment upon post-9/11 society. Marjorie Worthington dissects Jess Walter’s marginalized The Zero to assess how 9/11 served as a catalyst for government agencies to widen their control. Jeffrey Severs evaluates Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City use of historical amnesia and ontological uncertainty to record a liminal post-9/11 memorial practice. Tamara Watkins appraises Stephen King’s Under the Dome as a liberal text where community involvement and ethical journalism can intervene against tyrannical leadership. Anne Canavan examines the political metaphor of zombies in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, arguing that the novel is an allegory against a reinstatement of the old social and bureaucratic order in the wake of cataclysmic ruin. James N. Gilmore investigates the contemporary superhero film cycle as post-9/11 reality begins its second decade, assessing how terror and destruction—not awe or salvation—is a condition for all cityscapes today. The second section, “Perception, Ideology, and Community,” explores the limits of representation and cultural resistance. Amir Khadem considers Amy Waldman’s The Submission as a truly complex take of post-9/11 Muslim identity, interrogating its themes of America’s moral panic and valuation of politics over aesthetic. Damon Barta examines how concepts of homeland and innocence embolden the ideological resistance to military and social orthodoxy in Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds. Paul Petrovic studies Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector as a critique of the geopolitical willingness to exploit online security technology and how community and cultural homecoming can resist these bureaucratic practices that further blind

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American exceptionalism. Lloyd Isaac Vayo probes Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty against other accounts of the locating and execution of Osama bin Laden, assessing its representational dissonance with regard to torture, closure, and historical accuracy. Deborah Pless inspects facile criticism of the television series 24 and praise for Homeland, suggesting instead that the latter show exhibits a more ideologically problematic representation of Muslims. The third section, “Masculinity, Marginalization, Melancholy, and Hyper-Protection,” establishes how diverse texts have reconstructed models of post-9/11 resistance. Shana Kraynak uses the television series Breaking Bad to examine the reestablishment of remasculinized patriarchy, and how that parodic masculinity is itself a critique of post-9/11 America. Ken Feil draws on the complicating of normative gender in the wake of President Obama’s presidency, finding a radical negotiation of bromance and bromosexuality in the disaster films This Is the End and I’m So Excited! Elizabeth Lowry takes Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana to explore symbolic memory, otherness, and subject positions in the wake of 9/11. Megan Cannella examines Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom to assess how the parenting strategies long employed by the Berglund household breed a prison of indifference in their children and how, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, these strategies preclude post-9/11 maturity. Ariela Freedman analyzes Teju Cole’s ambivalent representation of 9/11 in Open City as a melancholy indictment of facile healing and recovery. Lin Knutson delves into the Adrienne Rich’s poetry as a space equally meant to memorialize and indict monologic forces of U.S. governmental bureaucracy. Finally, the closing section, “International Responses,” locates how adaptation studies and transnationalism can impact what we call a “post9/11 text.” Laura Findlay explores how the deliberately unresolved terrorist fears projected onto the protagonist, Changez, from Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist are alleviated so that Mira Nair’s 2012 adaptation highlights how innocence is wronged in the shifting politics of American foreign policy. Danica van de Velde draws upon Norwegian filmmaker’s Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st as an example of how international texts are nonetheless haunted by 9/11, using the controlled demolition of Oslo’s fifteen-story Philips Building as a way to study urban space and the violence of memorialization, of what is no more. These readings deepen the perception of what qualifies as a post-9/11 text, seizing on the ways in which time and distance mutate a country’s loss. The first wave of post-9/11 literature invariably enfolds individuals’ ruminations on the psychic damage wrought from the attack. The second wave of post-9/11 literature extends upon those themes, tracking the changing roles of administrative rhetoric and shifting values of masculinity as a deterrent to unilateralism. Representing 9/11 identifies how although a study on post-9/11 culture now brings about many disparate

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perspectives, from national exceptionalism to surveillance, from Muslim stereotypes to cultural bridge-making, such concerns are anchored by a profound need to record and understand these multivalent contexts. In doing so, this collection of essays situates the significance of where post9/11 literature and media is today. WORKS CITED Banita, Georgiana. “9/11 Trauma and Visual Witnessing in Helen Schulman’s A Day at the Beach.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 53, no. 1 (2012): 1–15. Print. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print. Bragard, Véronique, Christophe Dony, and Warren Rosenberg, eds. Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Print. Cockley, David. “Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall: Responding to the Media Spectacle.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 28, no. 1 (2009): 14–27. Print. Gray, Richard. After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Print. Hoffman, Cara. Be Safe I Love You. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. Print. Johnson, Kirk W. To Be a Friend Is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind. New York: Scribner, 2013. Print. Keeble, Arin. “Marriage, Relationships, and 9/11: The Seismographic Narratives of Falling Man, The Good Life, and The Emperor’s Children.” Modern Language Review 106, no. 2 (2011): 355–73. Print. Klay, Phil. Redeployment. New York: Penguin, 2014. Print. Mendelsohn, Daniel. “When It Comes to Fiction about National Tragedy, How Soon Is Too Soon?” Sunday Book Review, New York Times, July 27, 2014, BR31. Print. Ricks, Thomas E. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print. Rothberg, Michael. “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the 9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray.” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (2009): 152–8. Print. Schultermandl, Silvia. “Art Imitating Life? Visual Turns in 9/11 Novels.” In 9/11 as Catalyst: American and British Cultural Responses, edited by Dunja M. Mohr and Sylvia Mayer, 39–54. Tübingen, Germany: Königshausen and Neumann, 2010. Print. Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Print.

NOTES 1. See, for example, articles by Keeble and Schultermandl. 2. See Cockley’s article for commentary about Schwartz’s novel and Banita’s for Schulman’s.

I

Counterreactions against Realism

ONE Jess Walter’s The Zero Satirizing the “Desert of the Real” Marjorie Worthington

The events of 9/11 have engendered a large and distinctive body of literature and, naturally, an ever-growing array of attendant criticism. Thus far, some of the most influential criticism of “9/11 literature” is distinctly evaluative rather than analytical in nature. Instead of discussing the works in their own right, scholars of 9/11 literature often focus instead on delineating the characteristics they think such works should embody. This prescriptive tendency emerges from a particular anxiety surrounding 9/11, exemplified by this question posed by Kristiaan Versluys in his book Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel: “As every invented story about that tragic day is in a sense an appropriation of the event, who has the credentials to speak about it with authority?” (11). 1 A feeling that 9/11 is somehow sacred and the related suspicion that no one is truly qualified to write about it have given rise to a substantial critical charge that, thus far, literary writers have not been writing about 9/11 “correctly.” Because it deploys exaggeration and humor in unexpected, even shocking, ways, satire could provide a means to move beyond a realistic depiction of the events of 9/11 toward an exploration of the weighty issues beneath the surface of those events. Jess Walter’s strategic use of satire in his novel The Zero provides a powerful sense of the devastation of 9/11 and a sharp critique of the political uses to which it was put. With some exceptions, most literary works about 9/11 have hewn rather closely to the dictates of realism, often bordering on the naturalistic. 2 And this makes sense because, according to some critics, a “proper” 3

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9/11 novel, play, or poem should accurately and mimetically represent the events and aftermath of that day (Randall). Yet it should also demonstrate the inadequacy of language to represent that day or its aftermath with any accuracy (Versluys). Additionally, according to critics, this literature should: outline the contrast between the immediate national and international outpouring of panicked emotion and the subsequent political uses to which that panic and that emotion were put (Mishra); it should demonstrate a nuanced and intricate engagement with “the Other” that is often lacking in real-world reactions to 9/11 (Gray After the Fall); and it should gesture outside a U.S. frame toward an acknowledgment of the international effects of American colonialism and empire (Rothberg). 3 Thus, in much the same way that many established authors felt compelled to confront 9/11 directly in their work, many literary critics feel a similar need to establish clear criteria for how that event ought to be confronted, although it is difficult to imagine how a single work of literature could possibly represent all of these vital characteristics. Instead, for the most part, 9/11 novels tend to evoke 9/11 rather than grapple with it; characters live through and struggle to come to terms with the events, but they do so within surprisingly staid and standard narrative plots and structures. In these texts, 9/11 represents the climactic moment of rising action and the subsequent denouements wind up the conflict as quickly as the cleanup effort at Ground Zero. September 11 becomes a deus ex machina plot device that elicits from characters a greater enlightenment, the turning over of new leaves, the reevaluation of previous life choices, or any of a variety of novelistic clichés. In this sense, the traditional structures and plotlines of much 9/11 fiction could be read as an implicit repudiation of the idea that 9/11 was a worldaltering historical event. A notable exception to the above is Jess Walter’s The Zero. The Zero takes place in a city (never identified as New York) that has just suffered a terrorist attack (never explicitly called 9/11), which reduced several skyscrapers to rubble. Although an intensely personal story of an individual, The Zero also depicts a city (and nation) increasingly in the grip of political strongmen willing to exploit the confusing and frightening aftermath of the attacks in order to accrue power and wealth. In contrast to many of the novels I have mentioned, The Zero takes on national and international issues and provides a non-polemical look into the “terrorist mind.” And, perhaps most importantly, rather than simply depicting the events and their aftermath, The Zero employs an experimental style and structure to construct a scathing satire of American reaction to 9/11. The Zero’s strategy of satire and irony comes on the heels of many pundits’ affirmation that 9/11 marked the “end of irony.” William R. Jones cites just a few examples: “On 18 September, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter told the news website Inside.com that America had reached ‘the end of the age of irony’; on 21 September, Camille Dodero

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wrote in the Boston Phoenix of the end of ‘unbridled irony’ for a ‘coddled generation that bathed itself in sarcasm.’” Arguably, the spate of earnest realist fiction that followed 9/11 was due to this supposed rejection of irony. Ironically, the novel that perhaps most effectively represents the devastation and personal and political turmoil surrounding 9/11 is also decidedly satirical. The title The Zero refers to the shorthand name used by rescue workers for the site of the attacks and subsequent cleanup effort. The protagonist, Brian Remy, is a police officer struggling to help his city recover from these catastrophic events while he himself cannot do so. The city’s mayor is referred to as The Boss; he is a strident and charismatic figure perhaps loosely based on former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani but who seems more like a caricature of Bernard Kerik, the New York Police Department commissioner at the time of 9/11. Walter happened to be shadowing Kerik for a profile story when 9/11 occurred; consequently, Walter was afforded a unique close-up view of how the city leaders reacted to the tragedy. Perhaps for this reason, The Zero is imbued with a distinct political perspective—and subsequently a cynicism—not evident in other 9/11 texts. As a police officer, Brian Remy works frequently at “the Zero” and experiences firsthand the destruction of the collapsed buildings, the cleanup effort, and the pervasive acrid smell from the dust, or “flour of the dead” (14). Remy is afforded a view of the tragedy and its aftermath that most Americans did not get, yet his partner Paul notes that this close-up perspective adds to, rather than diminishes, the confusion they all feel. Paul says: “People ask me what it was like and I honestly don’t know. Sometimes I think the people who watched it on TV saw more than we did. . . . No matter how many times I tell the story, it still makes no sense to me” (85). Paul’s reaction is similar to many trauma sufferers’ in that he feels compelled to “tell the story,” to try—and fail—to construct a coherent narrative that could help reconcile himself to the tragedy. But, despite their closeness to the event, and their access to the city’s leaders and law enforcement, Paul and Remy have no better (and perhaps a worse) sense of what has happened than the average television viewer. What Remy and Paul do see, however, is what sets this novel apart from most 9/11 fiction; instead of the unironically tragic and unrelentingly realistic view of 9/11 evinced by most novels in this category, The Zero paints a surreal and satirical picture of the workings of city government in the days following the attacks. The novel depicts how the initial outpouring of concern and heroism among civic leaders and employees quickly devolves into cynical jockeying for position, as those nearest the tragedy figure out how to manipulate it for power and profit. For example, sub-bosses and chiefs of staff quickly learn to prepare for impromptu press conferences by keeping “at least one dust-covered jacket handy” to

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imply without words that they have just come from working at the cleanup site (Walter 50). News vans go “grief fishing,” slowly patrolling the streets looking for sad stories to titillate viewers (12), and Paul is thrilled when a company pays big money to use his image on boxes of First Responder Cereal. Even the security initiatives emerging from the events are tinged with the surreal: to handle the cleanup effort quickly and sensitively, the city created the Office of Liberty and Recovery, which has two bureaus: the Remains Recovery Department and “the even more secretive Documentation Department.” The first bureau plays a surprisingly small role: Remy and his fellow officers are horrified by how few human remains there are to be found at The Zero. The latter department, peopled by military intelligence, librarians, and accountants with Special Forces training, is particularly important to The Boss, who repeatedly asserts that “there is nothing so important as recovering the record of our commerce, the proof of our place in the world” (19). So begins the seemingly hopeless—and ridiculous—effort to find every scrap of paper that floated to the ground, or was combusted into dust, and reassemble and analyze those scraps in large warehouses. The towers and the people are gone, so officials focus their attention on the paper in a misguided attempt to restore something to its original, prelapsarian state. Soon, however, Remy notices that the warehouses are full of private records not limited to the time and place of the attacks. As a technician tells Remy: “The Liberty and Recovery Act mandates the recovery and filing of documents. It doesn’t specifically limit us to those documents recovered that day” (209). Thus, Document Recovery rapidly shifts from a naive and quixotic effort to restore normalcy to an insidious spying operation that reaches far beyond the purview of the original tragedy. This is, of course, an indirect jab at the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, which was quickly passed on October 26, 2001, and which had domestic-surveillance implications that far outstripped what many of its supporters intended. Thus, The Zero provides a humorous yet scathing depiction of the speed and extent to which those in power were able to leverage the terrorist attacks for political and economic gain at a time when the average citizen—like Remy—was still trying simply to recover from the attacks. Remy’s confusion (and therefore the reader’s) is compounded because he suffers from blackouts and eye problems that keep him from clearly seeing and understanding what is happening from one moment to the next. The novel is characterized by what Remy comes to call “gaps” in his memory, and the structure of the novel reflects those gaps; it consists of chronologically progressing fragments of Remy’s consciousness as he “comes to” in a variety of situations, usually completely unsure about where he is and what he is supposed to be doing. For example, the novel opens with Remy’s abrupt return to consciousness, alone and lying on the floor of his apartment, his head bleeding from an apparently self-

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inflicted gunshot wound. Remy himself is not sure if the wound was inflicted accidentally or was a purposeful suicide attempt. He has no memory of what he was doing immediately before he “awakens” to this moment. Before Remy can determine the truth of this situation, the episode breaks off in the middle of a sentence to open on a new scene, which again ends just as abruptly. The novel continues in this fragmentary fashion, breaking off and resuming in medias res where not only the reader but also Remy himself must try to figure out what is happening. This confusing, impressionistic structure is characteristic of fiction depicting trauma. According to Cathy Caruth, trauma survivors are not able immediately to make sense of what has happened to them: “The event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (Caruth 4). In other words, to “possess” or make sense of a traumatic event, a survivor must have time to understand it, often through the process of narrativization. However, Judith Herman argues that “traumatic memories are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story” (Herman 156–57). For this reason, trauma narratives—the written record of those memories—are usually not straightforwardly realistic ones; rather, they often adopt more innovative structures. Roger Luckhurst describes trauma narratives this way: “The aesthetic is uncompromisingly avant-garde: experimental, fragmented, refusing the consolations of beautiful form, and suspicious of familiar representational and narrative conventions” (81). Such narrative innovations are evident both in the first-person testimonies of actual trauma survivors and in fictional renderings of traumatic events. Trauma fiction, defined as fiction that attempts to depict trauma and the effects on those who experience it, must therefore cope with the fact that traditional notions of time, memory, and narrative are not relevant or even accessible to the trauma victim. Narrative experiments such as the ones Luckhurst describes are so typical as to be traditional in trauma fiction; he points out that “written stories involving trauma have ostentatiously played around with narrative time, disrupting linearity, suspending logical causation” (80). More traditionally mimetic styles are often deemed less authentic, since the trauma survivor may experience the world as a nonlinear, fragmented, and confusing place. For this reason, as I mentioned earlier, the traditional realistic nature of most 9/11 novels has been deemed by critics like Gray and Rothberg to indicate these authors’ woefully shallow engagement with 9/11 and its aftermath. As Gray says: “There is little sense here of what it is humanly like to encounter trauma. Equally, though, there is none of the confusion of feeling, the groping after a language with which to say the unsayable, that characterizes much of the fiction devoted to the new forms of terror” (“Open Doors” 132). Subsequently, attempts to employ trauma theory to analyze these texts

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are generally untenable, for most 9/11 narratives evince a fairly traditional structure. The Zero, on the other hand, employs several trauma-narrative innovations in its depiction of Remy’s post-9/11 experience, perhaps in an attempt to mirror the effects of 9/11 on a first responder. Furthermore, the novel’s fragmentation and repetitions appear not only on the level of structure but also of character. What I mean here is that not only does the reader experience the fragmented narrative, but also Remy experiences his life in these fragments as well. He is unable to remember what has occurred during his blackout periods—his “gaps”—and his retinas are detaching, causing “floaters” and “strings” in his eyes that preclude him from seeing clearly. Remy is a trauma survivor for whom time does not pass in a clear and linear fashion and for whom the world seems a confusing and hostile place. Furthermore, Remy’s literal blindness and inability to remember his past allegorically represents Americans’ inability—or unwillingness—to see the angling and deception surrounding post-9/11 politics or to remember the key facets of U.S. history that set the stage for 9/11 in the first place. Slowly it emerges that Remy is involved in some kind of covert operation coordinated by The Boss. He is enlisted to help in an investigation of March Selios, a young office worker presumed killed in the attacks, who may have been dating someone named Bishir who may have been involved in the attacks and who may have warned her to evacuate the building moments before the first plane hit. Remy and Markham, his partner in this assignment, need to find out what they can about March, whether she is alive and what she might know about the attacks. Markham says, “There’s an argument that this assignment encroaches somewhat on the activities of the bureau, or the agencies, which is one reason we wanted to go out of shop” (56). So, Remy embarks on a hazily defined investigation ostensibly under the aegis of a new and nebulously organized Office of Liberty and Recovery, but “out of shop,” so as not to attract the attention of the FBI or CIA. Combined with the confusion caused by Remy’s frequent memory lapses and his rapidly failing eyesight, the situation provides a darkly comic yet apt depiction of the chaos immediately following 9/11. Despite the fact that Remy does not have a clear sense of what he is working on, he somehow uncannily seems to stumble upon the right course of action in any situation. Or at least that is what his new partner, Markham, continually says. At one point, Remy emerges from a “gap” as he and Markham take a report from Mahoud, a Pakistani restaurant owner who has had a rock thrown through his window, apparently as an act of anti-Muslim vandalism. Remy, confused and unsure, remains silent while Markham tells the man that there is little they can do about the situation unless, “maybe if you were . . . helpful to us in some other area of our investigation, we could take an extra look at this harassment

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you’re getting” (113). They show Mahoud some photos, and Mahoud identifies his brother-in-law’s picture. While Remy remains silent, Markham says ominously, “All you have to do is help us find Bishir. . . .Then maybe we can protect your family” (114). Mahoud, scared, gives them some information about friends of Bishir’s, and the two officers leave, Remy too bewildered to have said a single word. Markham chuckles at Remy’s performance: “Damn, you’re good. . . . When you turn on that silent thing . . . it’s really chilling” (115). The scene becomes even more sinister when Remy replies, “Look, I don’t think I can do this anymore” and Markham, not understanding that Remy is indicating the entire operation, says, “Okay. . . . Next time I’ll throw the rock and you can do the talking” (116). What emerges here, of course, is that Markham and Remy have not only fostered Mahoud’s fears of being threatened as a Muslim in a post-9/ 11 New York but also Remy himself—during one of his “gaps”—committed the act of vandalism in the first place. Since The Boss assures Remy that this investigation is vital to national security, Remy carries on despite his great reservations. Thus, the novel makes oblique yet important reference to the post-9/11 climate that enabled the intrusive security measures, of questionable constitutionality, that quickly became commonplace. Another reason Remy does not object more strenuously to these dubious situations is that the gaps in his memory ensure that he does not have much agency anyway. Every time he begins to get a handle on what is going on around him, his memory lapses, and he awakens in a different situation. Even the things in his life that do not at first seem professional spin quickly out of his control. He falls in love, then finds the surveillance notes he apparently took regarding the woman, for she is April Selios, March Selios’s sister. The notes he does not remember taking indicate that he has been assigned to gain her trust as part of the investigation. At this point, Remy cannot even trust his emotions, for he cannot tell if his affair with April is about love or business. Remy begins to suspect not only that he actually has done some really bad things during his “gaps” but also that some part of him enjoys those things. In one instance, Remy awakes on a boat in international waters. In a locked room, a man named Assan is being interrogated; nearly naked, hands tied behind his back, Assan is slung forward, his feet dangling in the air. Markham begins asking Assan, “Where’s Bishir?” The man, crying, claims he does not know. “I don’t believe this,” Remy says, “We can’t do this” (136). When Markham leaves the room, Remy quickly gets Assan down from the bar, covers him with a jacket and speaks softly to him: “You’re going to be okay” (136). Remy bundles Assan onto a smaller boat and tells the pilot to take them to shore. Assan, relieved and weeping, reiterates that he does not know Bishir’s whereabouts but that there was a woman in Virginia that Bishir would sometimes stay with; Remy writes

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down her name, saying “It’s okay” (139). Instead of heading to shore, however, the boat pilot merely takes them on a long circuit back to the larger ship. Markham is waiting for them on deck with a pair of handcuffs, and Assan slumps to the floor crying. Markham asks Remy what Assan said, and Remy shows him the name of the woman in Virginia, to which Markham replies, “So Assan was holding out on us. . . . I was dubious, but damn if that didn’t go just like you said it would” (140). Clearly a part of Remy—the part we do not see—revels in this brutal work. Remy’s split personality not only represents the coping strategies developed by a survivor of trauma but also allegorically represents the ambivalent and two-sided reaction to the events of 9/11 of the country at large. In the aftermath of the attacks, the nation was emotionally devastated and anxious to contribute to the cleanup and recovery process in substantial ways. In contrast, however, the fear of a potential additional attack and desire for increased security devolved rather quickly into unsavory and possibly illegal surveillance, indefinite internment of suspects without trial, brutal interrogation tactics (torture), and a preemptive strike on a country completely uninvolved in 9/11. Our collective American consciousness, it could be argued, mirrored Remy’s own: on one hand, we wanted to unite around the common cause of healing and recovery from the attacks; on the other, we wanted to be protected at any cost while remaining largely ignorant of the harsh tactics being employed by government agencies on our behalf. One hand did not want to know what the other hand was doing, a policy that led to a “global war on terror” that spread far beyond the hunt for members of al-Qaeda. The character of Remy, then, could be taken as an allegorical representation of the entire nation: part of him is caring and conscientious, and part of him—unseen and mysterious even to himself—is ruthless in the name of carrying out a clandestine mission that becomes more widespread and hazy as the novel progresses. Another way in which The Zero could be read allegorically is through the grieving process of Remy’s sixteen-year-old son, Edgar. Edgar has been telling teachers and friends at school that Remy, as a police officer and first responder, died in the 9/11 attacks. When confronted about this lie by Remy and his ex-wife, Carla, Edgar claims that he knows Remy has not really died but he needs to grieve for his lost father nonetheless. Edgar explains that his grief is not due to his parents’ divorce, nor is it about, as Carla puts it, “Your father’s inability to commit emotionally” (33). Edgar insists that he is not mourning Remy’s absence or his symbolic or metaphorical death. Rather, he feels compelled to mourn the literal death of his father, even though his father is not actually dead. Edgar argues that he is experiencing grief in the same way as the children who did lose a parent on 9/11: in a specific, not generalized, way. He defines the difference between “generalized” grief and “real” grief: “Generalized

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grief is a fleeting emotion, like lust. It’s a trend, just some weak shared moment in the culture, like the final episode of some TV show everybody watches. . . . But real grief. . . . The only way to comprehend something like this is to go through it. Otherwise, it’s just a number. Three thousand? Four thousand? How do you grieve a number?” (34) Edgar rejects what most Americans experienced in terms of 9/11 shock and sadness as “generalized grief”: a tragic yet communal and unifying event we experienced through media outlets. He makes the case that, although Americans felt many emotions after 9/11, real grief is an emotion reserved for those experiencing specific personal loss. Implicit in Edgar’s peroration is the belief that 9/11 was not as far-reaching an event as it seemed at first and that most Americans were not, as has often been claimed, direct sufferers of trauma. 4 Yet, at the same time, Edgar’s effort to claim authentic grief for the inauthentic death of his father is still an appropriation of the tragedy of 9/ 11. In this way, the character of Edgar could also be seen as an allegorical representation of the American public at large, who wanted to experience a national emotion—a generalized grief—in response to the shocking events, even if they had little or no direct connection with 9/11 itself. Furthermore, because Edgar is yet another person claiming to know how one ought to grieve, he could also be read as a stand-in for the political and economic leaders who tried to shape the form that the nation’s grief should take, arguing that “proper” grief should take the form of shopping and unconditional support for governmental initiatives, no matter how far-fetched they were. Even President Bush famously exhorted Americans to spend money to sustain the economy. 5 In a related and hilarious moment in The Zero, The Boss shouts: “These bastards hate our freedoms. . . . This is a war we fight with wallets and purses, by making dinner reservations and going to MOMA, by having drinks at the Plaza. And we will fight back. We will fight back even if it means that every American sits through Tony and Tina’s goddamn Wedding!” (51). Thus the novel critiques the post-9/11 notion that buying well was the best revenge. But there were other, more insidious instances of harnessing Americans’ post-9/11 fear and desire for security, and, as I have argued, The Zero delves into those unsettling aspects as well. For example, hidden cameras are placed around the paper recovery area “to try to catch rescue workers and equivocators looking through documents” (38). The wording suggests that the cameras are not meant to capture possible spies or terrorists but rather those who might “equivocate” about the policies of the Office of Liberty and Recovery. As The Boss says to Remy as he prepares him for his new covert assignment: “I hope you’re not questioning the direction of the country? . . . That’s exactly what the other side wants, Brian. For us to start doubting our actions before we’ve even had a chance to take them. Every question we ask is a love letter to our ene-

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mies” (54). This, of course, echoes the President Bush’s statement: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (“Address”). The Zero puts a satiric cast on Gray’s argument that “the period of commemoration has been hijacked by a series of events tied to it in rhetoric if not necessarily in reality: the ‘war on terror,’ the PATRIOT Act, extraordinary rendition, the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq” (After the Fall 8). The Zero also chronicles the domestic internecine conflicts that 9/11 laid bare. For example, the turf wars between security agencies is made evident when Dave, Remy’s CIA contact, begs Remy to keep him informed about his mission by saying, “I mean—we have a common enemy, right? The bureau?” (256). The lack of cooperation and communication between the agencies is demonstrated when Remy realizes that the man he has been passing money to is a Muslim man code-named Jaguar, who the CIA believes is planning to plant a bomb. Markham explains to Remy that, “at the highest levels,” a concern has emerged that the public perception of terrorist threat has “waned” (273, 274). Dave continues: “we think it’s counterproductive for the public to view our enemies as a bunch of harmless nuts. . . . An enemy without weapons is a dog without teeth. So we are not to move until the enemy has an incendiary device” (274). What now emerges is that, unbeknownst to the CIA, Remy, undercover for The Boss, has been passing money to enable Jaguar to build that device. This entire “terrorist” plot has been instigated and funded by The Boss in order to fuel the public’s fear and consolidate his own power. Jaguar, then, is not a terrorist but rather a man who believes he is working with the United States to capture a terrorist group. As the “plot” unfolds, it is revealed that all the “terrorist” participants believe this: those working for the CIA think those working for the FBI are the “real” terrorists and vice versa. Thus, instead of attempting to portray “the terrorist mind,” The Zero depicts various Muslim immigrant figures who, anxious to prove their loyalty to their adopted country in the face of increasing anti-Muslim sentiment, agree to work undercover for the various security agencies. Each thinks he is helping to entrap real terrorists by pretending to be part of a cell; instead, the plan reaches its climax as members of the different agencies burst into the room and kill everyone associated with the false bomb plot. Each agency can then take credit for foiling a terrorist plot, with no surviving witnesses to testify to the contrary. When Jaguar realizes that the plot he was meant to expose was not devised by terrorists but by the government agencies, his sense of betrayal pushes him toward actual terrorist activity, and he detonates the bomb meant for the pseudo-terrorists. The efforts of the various security agencies to make themselves look good have turned an ally into an enemy and actually caused a terrorist attack under the guise of preventing one. Viewed figuratively—allegorically—this episode demonstrates how U.S. policy often cultivates the very terrorist activity it is putatively meant to curtail, a point often made about current U.S. drone attacks

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causing civilian casualties but which also could be made about the U.S. policy in the 1980s of arming the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet Union, leading eventually to the emergence of the Taliban in the first place. This episode also demonstrates the effect of the privatization of military operations emphasized during the post-9/11 years, for the entire “bombing” operation facilitates The Boss’s transformation from mayor to CEO of a company called “Secure Inc.,” which, as it turns out, Remy has been working for all along. Confused once again, Remy asks, “I work for you. . . . I’m not . . . working for the government . . . on some secret case” (296). The Boss replies: “We stepped in to do work that the government couldn’t. . . . In today’s world, there is no separation between civilian and soldier, between business and government. The private sector is the ultimate covert ops” (296). The turf war among agencies has become moot: while Remy (as stand-in for the American people) was trying to cope with his confusion and grief, The Boss was presiding over the militarization of the private sector security industry (e.g., Blackwater and Halliburton), whose reach outstretches that of the security agencies and for which there is unlimited potential for profit. Thus, The Zero starkly outlines the post-9/11 political and military landscape, demonstrating the extent to which 9/11 served as an opportunity for legislators and government agencies to widen their scope and power. The Zero somewhat cynically suggests that this power grab represents all the world-changing effect 9/11 has had. Indeed, as I have argued, the perceived banality of much of the literary response to 9/11 provokes the uncomfortable suspicion that, while deeply tragic, 9/11 has not been the catalyst for national and international reimagining that it was touted at the time to be. Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley go so far as to reject this “turning point” view of history, which “tends to reduce complex historical forces to a mechanistic theory of cause and effect, or privileges catastrophic events at the expense of more subterranean political, social and cultural currents that might turn out to have more profound effects on shaping the future” (3). However, while I do not posit The Zero as the panacea for the supposedly inadequate genre of 9/11 literature, its use of satire and allegory provides a vivid and instructive portrayal of personal and national perspectives on 9/11 and its aftermath. The Zero suggests that, rather than (or in addition to) being a turning point in American and world history, 9/11 increased the power of those willing and able to exploit the fear and confusion generated by the attacks. The Zero posits that, rather than being outdated, satire and allegory are ideally suited to make sense of the post-9/11 world.

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WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor W. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” In Prisms. Translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber, 17–34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Banita, Georgiana. Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Bush, George W. “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People.” September 20, 2001. George W. Bush Whitehouse Archives. July 7, 2012. http:// georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html. ———. “Remarks to Airline Employees in Chicago, Illinois.” September 27, 2001. The American Presidency Project. July 7, 2012. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index. php?pid=65084&st=&st1=#axzz1OQEXjXZr. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Däwes, Birgit. Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel. Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011. Gray, Richard. After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. ———. “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis.” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (2008): 128–51. Halliwell, Martin, and Catherine Morley. “The Next American Century?” In American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century, edited by Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley, 1–17. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Perseus Books, 1992. Jones, William R. “‘People Have to Watch What They Say’: What Horace, Juvenal, and 9/11 Can Tell Us about Satire and History.” Helios 36, no. 1 (2009): 27–53. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Laub, Dori. “September 11, 2001—an Event without a Voice.” In Trauma at Home: After 9/11, edited by Judith Greenberg, 204–15. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. New York: Routledge, 2008. Mishra, Pankaj. “The End of Innocence.” The Guardian, May 18, 2007. Randall, Martin. 9/11 and the Literature of Terror. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Rothberg, Michael. “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray.” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (2008): 153–58. Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Walter, Jess. The Zero. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

NOTES 1. This discussion echoes that which took place in relation to the Holocaust. See Theodor Adorno’s oft-cited essay on the subject, originally written for a festschrift but published as: “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. 2. I employ Birgit Däwes’s definition of “9/11 fiction” as fiction in which “the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington provide the entire or a part of the setting, they feature more or less prominently as a historical context (establishing a particular atmosphere or set of themes), or they have a decisive function for the development of the plot, the characters, or the novel’s symbolism” (6). 3. For more discussion of this critical trend of declaring what 9/11 literature “should” be, see Georgiana Banita’s Plotting Justice in which she argues that the decade after 9/11 was marked by “attempts to rewrite the tenets and responsibilities of

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narrative ethics, and in particular of the novel, as permanently charged and altered by the events of September 11” (4). 4. Trauma theorist Dori Laub described 9/11 as “an experience of collective massive psychic trauma” (204), while E. Ann Kaplan, in response to the attacks, extends the concept of “vicarious trauma” to include the entire city of New York (147). 5. Bush famously told airline employees that Americans should “Get on board; do your business around the country; fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots; get down to Disney World in Florida; take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed” (“Remarks”).

TWO Memorializing Post-9/11 New York in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City Jeffrey Severs

So don’t ask how the world has changed—ask how I have changed. The answer is: I’ve changed slightly. I read my newspapers with increased horror and distrust, I regard the leaders of nations and movements with increased revulsion, I suffer increased shame at my own paralyzed inaction, and every day I give a quarter to the woman who sits on the corner of my block. The only question she asks—“Hey, do you have a quarter?”—is one to which I at least know an answer. —Jonathan Lethem, “To My Italian Friends,” The Ecstasy of Influence

My epigraph comes from an open letter Jonathan Lethem wrote for the program of an Italian book festival to which he had been invited in September 2002. He was tasked with speaking “on [the] question of how the world has changed since September 11” (Ecstasy 227). His answer shows a commitment to remaining attentive to the “every day” world of New York, to humble bonds of the communal and charitable—ideals that a grander invitation to pronounce on the world—historical from the vantage of a New York–identified writer seems to compromise. In this chapter, I use these formulations about a highly local response to 9/11 as an interpretive guide to the novel Lethem would publish in 2009, Chronic City, a book of hallucination and willed forgetfulness with a slippery relationship to September 11, 2001, and to the questions of how properly to memorialize its victims and reconstruct community in the aftermath. What emerges is a text that repeatedly asserts the power of chronicling a surviving, everyday city of those close at hand over the defining force of a singular, apocalyptic day, even in the creation of memorials and rituals 17

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of memory around that apocalypse. Such slyly wrought and surreal features mark Chronic City as unique within a developing canon of 9/11 New York novels that has been criticized for forgetting or avoiding the violent realities of that day and its imperial contexts. In the one book-length study of the author, Jonathan Peacock claims that in Chronic City Lethem (author of Amnesia Moon, editor of The Vintage Book of Amnesia) uses his recurrent trope of the amnesiac—here focused on feckless narrator Chase Insteadman, a former child actor hazy on political realities and even his own life’s details—to indict the United States’ “deliberate avoidance” of 9/11 and its causes, criticizing a culture in which New York’s tragedy has been co-opted by politicians and a mass media that prizes “a false sense of televisual community over . . . national, urban or familial” connections (152, 153). I add to Peacock’s essentially apt characterization a view of Lethem’s still more important critical efforts on two fronts: first, his fitful restoration of memory in Chase, grounded in modernist aestheticism and pointed toward a memorial practice that truly serves post-9/11 New York, second, Lethem’s use of the official responses to 9/11 to satirize conditions of leadership, wealth, and community that endure beyond that defining day—the city of chronic civic problems that lack the drama of heroic rescue or the World Trade Center Memorial. Introducing a collection of essays on Literature after 9/11 and addressing the 9/11 Memorial as at once “a symbolic space” and “something like an actual graveyard,” Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn write that “no one wants 9/11 to be misrepresented, politicized, co-opted, or distorted. Yet, it seems difficult not to do just this” (1). Lethem enters this difficult discourse at the highly oblique angle his ludic postmodernism and interest in virtuality grant him: rather than contend realistically and solemnly with 9/11 memory as it is popularly depicted and co-opted, he embraces surrealism and injects new symbolic material—from the work of Franz Kafka and Wallace Stevens to Stanley Kubrick and Jenny Holzer—into an effort to resurrect the Twin Towers and reinscribe an idiosyncratic New York, freeing the attentive reader to do something like the same for herself. The effect of this text’s occlusions and intertextuality is thus far more complex than Birgit Däwes lets on when, pointing out Chase’s oblivion to the connections between 9/11’s planes and the birds he enjoys watching orbit a church, she claims, “In the virtual cityscape that Lethem describes, the question of whether 9/11 happened or not does not even seem to matter” (110). Never directly mentioning 9/11 or the year 2001, Lethem’s novel should be read alongside post-9/11 narratives in which the event itself does not appear but haunts many pages, such as David Foster Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel,” Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, Teddy Wayne’s Kapitoil, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Lethem calls Chronic City “a reality-shifted version of the middle of this past decade,” a book “about not thinking about 9/11” (Clarke 170; “Jonathan

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Lethem”). Conceived in 2004 out of sadness over the reelection of George W. Bush, “it sort of centers in-between the two disasters, 9/11 and then the economic collapse, [and is] about being lost somewhere in-between those two,” Lethem says (Clark 170). In the book, Chase mentions, without ever fully explaining, that a gray fog envelops lower Manhattan, representing both 9/11 (the fog as a version of the lingering smoke and ash from that day) and the 2008 financial meltdown (Wall Street brokers, men in new gray flannel suits, appear uptown with the fog clinging to them). New York Times readers can buy a “War Free edition” in which they follow not Afghanistan and Iraq but the epistolary story of Chase’s love affair with a dying astronaut in orbit named Janice Trumbull—a bread-and-circuses media concoction revealed to be two-faced (Janice=Janus), trumped-up, and bull (180). Meanwhile, the city administration puts forth the dubious story that a giant escaped tiger is responsible for sudden craters and stopped subway lines that eerily evoke the 9/11 attacks themselves. Chase, paranoid cultural critic Perkus Tooth, and the other main characters, all unlikely friends, spend most of the narrative preoccupied not with the memory of disaster but with a Tolkienesque quest to purchase or steal enthralling vase-like artworks, made up by Lethem and known as chaldrons (the group is at one point called the Fellowship of the Chaldron [453]). 1 In the text, Chronic City is a brand of pot that turns out to be grown not in South America (as one smoker speculates it could be) but in a nearby Manhattan apartment (217). Thus the city itself, as suggested from the title, is a source of hallucination—heightened experiences lie right in front of these sensorily dulled characters, a stance Lethem, one of the great contemporary artists of the urban sublime, summarizes early on with the title of an invented film noir through which Chase meets Perkus, The City Is a Maze (1). The city is a labyrinthine network, but also, per recent slang, the city is “amaze,” that is, amazing. With the novel’s title, though, Lethem also works in philosophical terms with a dichotomy Frank Kermode describes in his critical classic on the theological underpinnings of apocalyptic writing, The Sense of an Ending. As Kermode notes in defining modern novels’ relationships to apocalyptic endings, chronos is “passing time” or “waiting time” (47), time in its mere “successiveness,” whereas kairos is “a point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end” (46). While I do not mean for the fit between Lethem’s writing and these biblical definitions of time to be exact or rigid, we can say that his chronos-inspired chronic city generally stands against pregnant, apocalyptic time—against the idea of a city defined by a moment of great extremity. For Lethem, such everyday time is not mundane, nor is the means of accessing it. These meanings are encoded in the chaldron, which evokes the sorcerer’s cauldron but with a spelling—ch---ron, suggesting “chron-” and chronos— that focuses readers on the memorable bonding rituals, the “passing

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time,” of the friends’ frustrated attempts to win eBay auctions for one, unaware that a moneyed class controls them as part of a Second Life–like game economy Lethem cheekily dubs Yet Another World (224). In terms of the “intimate action” Lethem says the book is about (Clarke 180), Chase’s intense concern for Perkus, whose chronic headaches are another title reference point, recalls Lethem’s remarks on the woman on his block asking for a quarter: “my caring for him could matter,” Chase says, “on a daily basis” (27). The focus on the daily extends to the novel’s grim sense of post-9/11 civic politics as well, where the real subject is not emergency but what a scene of failed subway service calls “civic ineptitude,” a chronic condition of New York (113). Super-rich Mayor Jules Arnheim (read: jewels), a chaldron owner who does not appreciate its beauty at all, is a satire of Michael Bloomberg but also of Rudy Giuliani and his notorious law-andorder tactics, particularly menacing and prominent in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Richard Abneg, former anarchist now turned fixer for Arnheim, is emblematic of the Foucaultian disciplining in the air, while Perkus, a poster artist, takes jabs at Arnheim’s “quality-of-life police” and “graffiti patrol” (221). One of the climactic encounters of Chronic City is between Chase, a plaything of the power structure with his Janice story, and a sinister Arnheim: appropriate to the noir structures Lethem often employs, corruption here goes all the way to the top. While the fog’s most visceral reference is to the lingering smell and ash of 9/11, the literary origin is Dickens’s Bleak House, where fog symbolizes a London stuck in moral haze and legal-bureaucratic torpor. 2 The tiger, though, is the best example of Lethem’s studied combinations of 9/11 politics, mundane civic reference points, and the restorative sublime. The tiger functions as both a cover story for the failures of a subway-tunneling robot and a menacing piece of propaganda that keeps the populace on edge and checking “the city’s Tiger Watch Web site,” Lethem’s joke about Homeland Security’s manipulations of color-coded post-9/11 terror warnings (238). But an actual giant tiger (“languorous, hypnotic, serene” [434]) does ultimately appear to Chase and Richard, and in the romanticism underlying this image is the alluring danger of Blake’s tiger, which Lethem mentions as an inspiration along with Charles Finney’s Unholy City (Clarke 173)—though in an account of commonplace New York corruption, also in play is Thomas Nast’s Tiger of Tammany Hall and machine politics. For as it razes buildings without warning and displaces residents (including Perkus himself), the tiger’s other real-life referent is the ambiguously controlled forces of rent control’s end and rampant gentrification—problems that last long beyond the cordoned-off neighborhoods of 9/11. When Chase hails a cab and scoffs at the people waiting in bad weather for a shuttle bus for swallowing the tiger story, his girlfriend Oona calls him out for his lack of empathy—and Lethem skewers rich

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New Yorkers insulated from shared, chronically underfunded infrastructure. Lethem recognizes that public art became a newly central part of that infrastructure in the aftermath of 9/11 as well; before examining his approach to the 9/11 Memorial, let me attend to the unexpected range of intertexts he draws on in defining the dynamic aesthetics of commemoration he thinks the city deserves. Lethem’s critics have registered the tremendous importance of revising genre forms—detective fiction, sci-fi, film noir, to name just a few—to his particular brand of postmodernism. But with Chronic City, Lethem has even more dramatically “crossed the divide from genre writer to serious artist,” as Andrew Hoberek in 2007 put the achievement of The Fortress of Solitude (2003) (238). Modernist aestheticism is everywhere in Chronic City as Lethem centers his gaze not on the Tolkien- and comics-inspired ring of Fortress but an artwork not from any identifiably generic realm. “An object, the chaldron testified to zones, realms, elsewheres” (152): in this ecstatic experience, Lethem echoes “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens, who writes of a beautiful singer, “There never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made,” with the speaker finding that after her song lights on the seashore “fix[] emblazoning zones and fiery poles” (130). The luminous vessel that rearranges the world around it also owes a debt to Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar.” As Chase rhapsodizes about the chaldron, Richard seals the connection: “Despite [your] sounding like a retarded Wallace Stevens I actually get you.” Richard then invokes another American modernist touchstone of grounded aesthetics, this one Hemingway’s: “That thing’s the ultimate bullshit detector” (152). As with the tiger, Lethem marks urban sublimity’s perception, sharpened by the experience of art, as an opponent of political degradation: “the chaldron interrogated Manhattan, made it seem an enactment” or, as Perkus puts it, “a fake, a bad dream” (152). On the novel’s first page, Chase, author-surrogate, is introduced as one who will “play the voice” of the “late émigré auteur Von Tropen Zollner” on the DVD of The City Is a Maze; we hear no more of that project, but the novel itself, voiced almost entirely by Chase, is where he learns some direction and “Tropen” (troping), taking at least meager control of his scripted existence (1). Lethem has structured his books according to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist before, saturating Fortress with Icarian themes and mixing third- and first-person in mimicry of Stephen’s move into diary mode (note the trace of Dedalus in protagonist Dylan Ebdus). The blank Chase is a less likely modernist artist, but his narrative nonetheless culminates on an achingly beautiful evocation of childhood, the story of his teenage relationship to the real Janice that he has for most of the novel passively allowed to be distorted and exploited. 3 So too in Perkus’s battle, through the fog of headaches, to “reconstruct an epiphany” of ten years before in his posters’ cut-up texts, Lethem makes a post-

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modernist’s response to a Joycean institution (83). Proust figures as well: in an allusion to Marcel’s spire at Combray, Chase meditates frequently at his window on birds that fly in great cycles around a distant church steeple, which, together with the Dorfll Tower in which he resides, becomes the novel’s perspectival reconstruction of the Twin Towers, with the birds as counters to weaponized jets. In Chase’s birds and throughout, Chronic City is a book of odd rituals, frequently examining the funereal and seeking a refreshed relationship to aspects of culture that, even at Ground Zero and in the wake of the seismic 9/11, seem mechanized and lacking in social cohesion. Oona and Chase attend the celebrity-studded, quite hollow funeral of science-fiction writer Emil Junrow, while, as Lethem has said, the deliberate echo of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in Ralph Warden Meeker’s massive novel Obstinate Dust became (when Wallace committed suicide in 2008) a memorial tribute. 4 Moreover, as the reader only belatedly realizes, Chronic City is a memorial to Perkus, tracking him through the last several months of his life: the narrator with the seemingly hazy memory of world events has been vividly creating a memory of his friend all along. In larger-scale terms, Richard, first seen at an opulent dinner party gnawing on a duck bone in an “atavistic tableau,” speaks for the urge to reanimate lost ritual and memorial forms (34). He gives an impassioned interpretation of his recent visit to Stonehenge, widely construed to be a burial site and scene of ritual ancestor worship. In his deliciously scathing voice, Richard sees the contemporary experience of Stonehenge as unbearably commodified and mechanized, as bad cyclicality in a text in search of salutary circles: “You trudge around single file in a circle,” “in a kind of track,” and “the thing looks a little smaller and less mysterious than you’d hoped” (39). Richard claims that the true scene of togetherness takes place in the restroom after the tour, where unfortunately the urinals are not arranged in a circle; he wants to make the everyday, uncommodifiable experience of human grotesqueness—the ritual of urination—the focus. Rather than part of a tired non-ritual, Richard, solidifying this novel’s general embrace of an animal self, would rather “be like one of those apes . . . kneeling in fear before those slabs” in Kubrick’s 2001 (39). A minor character then completes Lethem’s ingenious link between Stonehenge and remembrance of September 2001 by saying, “They should change the name of that movie . . . since the real 2001 turned out so different” (39). This stands, in Lethem’s oblique allusions and inventions, as the only reference to “the real 2001” in a novel thoroughly haunted by its history. We are meant to see in Richard’s rant Lethem’s vision of the touristic, meaning-drained ritual that commemoration of 9/11 threatens to become. Analogous versions of this conjunction of animal life, ritual patterning, and contemporary worship would include Chase’s spire of birds, “a mystery in itself” that he treats with a weakly religious awe (68). Chase,

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awakened by afternoon light “as the sun at last breaks past the edge of the Dorfll Tower,” is also akin to Kubrick’s apes—and 2001’s viewers—in the famous frames that show the sun emerging over the top edge of the monolith (66). All these layered allusions alienate us from modes of sacredness we thought we knew, especially in regard to 9/11. This renovation of 2001’s commemoration becomes clearer when later scenes reconfigure the World Trade Center Memorial itself. Both as a surreal memorialist and as seeker of Oona Laszlo’s attentions, Chase becomes a rival of “dystopian” earthworks artist Laird Noteless (277), who receives commissions from wealthy New York patrons (one Lethem joke involves a fundraiser for a Manhattan Reification Society [128]). Noteless’s Urban Fjord, though displaced by Lethem to the Bronx, is a “chasm” that reads clearly as satire of the World Trade Center Memorial in lower Manhattan, where Noteless has a Memorial to Daylight amid the fog (108). Urban Fjord is an “artificial crevasse,” made as if by “a titanic ax . . . descended from heaven” and lying in clear contrast to the energizing chaldrons (109). Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s design for the World Trade Center Memorial, Reflecting Absence, includes two large voids containing recessed pools in the Towers’ footprints; on the evidence of Fjord, this actual memorial seems to Lethem to reflect not just absence but a deathliness and despair imitative of, perhaps reifying of, the attack. Laird is larded with city commissions, while the name Noteless opposes him to the motif of musical harmony so important to Lethem’s small, invigorating societies. Noteless’s alienating, even dangerous crevasse has become a trash dump for the locals, who respond to his “antihumanist” work by tossing in unwanted “children’s toys, kitchenware, electronics” (96, 109). This “cascade of garbage was the only thing ‘urban’ about this Fjord,” Chase notes, “since the city was entirely out of view” (109). Lethem registers in this dissonance between community and public art his feelings about the refashioning of Lower Manhattan as political spectacle: as he says in an interview, Chronic City responds to a post-9/11 period in which the “intense collective trauma” of the attacks came to “no longer belong[] to New York” and was “appropriated for a giant political purpose elsewhere” (“Jonathan Lethem”). The ideal memorial, like the best art, exists in the response it calls forth, as Lethem’s endorsement of “plagiaristic” art in “The Ecstasy of Influence” and his fiction’s mammoth intertextualities proclaim; art is ideally note-ful, not Noteless, and this aesthetic deeply influences the type of 9/11 memorial Lethem implicitly advocates. In his 2010 monograph on John Carpenter’s They Live, Lethem describes his love for the work of Jenny Holzer (69–70). Holzer’s beginnings in the late 1970s pasting unsigned posters on New York streets are echoed in Perkus’s broadsides made of cut-up headlines and scattered texts and called “a kind of public art” (7). Lethem himself follows suit, saying he begins writing novels by “accumulat[ing] shards of utterances, like a ransom note or

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early punk-rock flyer. . . . I glue shit together and stare at it, wishing for my book” (Ecstasy 248–49). In 2006, Holzer unveiled For 7 World Trade, one of her crawling LED displays, in the lobby of the building erected on the site of the one destroyed in the aftershocks of the 9/11 attacks. In line with Chronic City, this “memorial” does not refer to the dead; as Holzer says, it contains “not memorial text but text about the joy of being in New York City.” 5 Likewise, For 7 World Trade is a palimpsest: Holzer, who stopped writing her own texts in 2001, places in the display lines from Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, and others. As is the case in “The Ecstasy of Influence” and Chronic City (which features at the back a note on Lethem’s borrowings), the poetry and prose appear in Holzer’s installation without immediate attribution. Finally, Holzer’s artwork makes itself part of the everyday city’s texture: if one wants to see the “entire” work, it takes eight hours for all the texts to scroll by on the lobby wall in a commercial building, without the ostentation of a museum, gallery, or sacred memorial site. Lethem must have memorial practices like Holzer’s in mind when he writes, “He may not be visible to anyone else” in the final line of a 2008 poem (a form quite rare for Lethem) titled “Memorial.” It echoes yet another modernist exemplar, Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” and describes a memorial that is far from monumental or merely symbolic; this uncanny entity seems to be a makeshift living space, a home for the poem’s speaker as well as “squatters,” but also a body, perhaps a “golem” that “grunts,” perhaps a “scarecrow” (a hollow man? another Insteadman?). “Memorial” memorializes by skirting its topos and embracing temporal paradox: “Well, the first thing to admit / Is that it isn’t dead yet. Or never lived. / It was a memorial to itself all along,” the first three lines read (Ecstasy 437–38). At the end, through a series of anthropological images reminiscent of Kafka’s story about leopards breaking into a temple to drink from the sacrificial pitchers and becoming part of a new ritual—a parable Lethem calls a source for his tiger (Clarke 173)—the poem wonders whether memorials might in fact not look backward but become premonitory, serving as “a scarecrow on shoals, a warning” (Ecstasy 438). Accepting the strangeness and spontaneous transformation of meaningful rituals, their materials, and the remembered events they encode and dramatize—this seems to be connective tissue of Kafka’s parable, “Memorial,” and Chronic City, which refuses readers a clear backward glance upon a fateful day. Like the speaker of “Memorial,” Chase is last seen looking out from his home in the Dorfll Tower, a living memorial to the Twin Towers it unassumingly evokes. He casually notices that the “Dorfll Tower had shifted a little to the right, shaving another margin from my window’s view. I don’t know how this can be possible, but then again there are so many things that escape me. It’s still a view I can live with” (467). Here is another clear echo of Lethem’s insistence that he and his city after 9/11

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had “changed slightly”—with the life and art he was eager to return to after that day producing not solemn remembrance so much as a manageable disturbance, a reimagined city that, like Chase and the birds, “abid[es] . . . through all these weeks and days” (467). Lethem achieves this resolution by wresting a living city, chronic conditions and all, back from the many Manhattan Reification Societies that would convert networks of living memory into anesthetized things outside of time. In closing, let me turn outward and place Chronic City alongside books that have answered more readily to the name “9/11 novel.” Lethem’s avoidance of the tragic day itself would seem to make him suspect to two bracing criticisms of works that do in some way recreate the attacks. Elizabeth Anker, writing in 2011, finds male novelists including Jess Walter, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Colum McCann, and Jonathan Safran Foer mounting “overridingly conservative reactions to the event” that, frequently free of the complications of race and gender, “subdu[e] 9/11’s fraught sociopolitical meanings” (464). Many of these political allegories tiredly use male mid-life crises to “index[] American ineptitude, or the disavowed truth of late imperial impotence” (464). Simultaneously amnesiac and nostalgic, indicting Americans’ denial of history but offering apology for forgetting, these novels, often by employing the sublime, “encode[] sentiments at once idealized and regressive,” Anker claims (468). David Simpson, writing in 2008, claims the 9/11 novels of John Updike and Claire Messud, free of depictions of death in the Towers, “share a common intuition—that nothing has changed, that life goes on, and that life is not very interesting or satisfying.” The question, Simpson continues, “is whether this response (or lack of it) is a tribute to the resilience of ordinary life or a more damning indictment of the sheer indifference and self-centeredness of the homeland mainstream” (216). Suggesting that the latter is most often the case and that Messud and Updike themselves are not immune from the same indictment, Simpson laments the “formally and thematically conservative” U.S. and British novels of 9/11 that shrink from the task of graphically depicting what happened in the Towers (220). Chronic City—dependent on an aimless, amnesiac male narrator’s saga of disconnection and self-overcoming through sublime art, erasing the violent day from memory in favor of magical happenings and a return to normalcy “shifted a little”—could conceivably become the next exhibit in either Anker’s or Simpson’s indictments. But Chronic City thematizes amnesia and nostalgia in such a way that the reader never feels at all secure in identifying with Chase’s mindset or his descriptions; likewise, rather than avoiding the grittier realism Simpson wants, Lethem recognizes the applicability of his existing idiom of ontological uncertainty, refashioned from the likes of Philip K. Dick, to seeing more fully, as distance from the day grows, all the absences and irreality it has left behind. Making a surreal reply to the use of the attacks for political gain, Lethem takes as

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his subject not 9/11 but the cultural apparatus that has sought to assimilate, tame, and, worst of all, exploit its fraught memory. Perhaps Chronic City will come to be seen as the leading edge of new developments: a post-9/11 literature that, in being true to that terrible day’s multivalent memory, must both be and not be about 9/11. WORKS CITED Anker, Elizabeth. “Allegories of Falling and the 9/11 Novel.” American Literary History 23, no. 3 (2011): 463–82. Print. Clarke, Jaime, ed. Conversations with Jonathan Lethem. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Print. Collins, Glenn. “At Ground Zero, Accord Brings a Work of Art.” New York Times. March 6, 2006. Web. Däwes, Birgit. Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel. Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011. Print. Hoberek, Andrew. “Introduction: After Postmodernism.” Twentieth-Century Literature 53, no. 3 (2007): 233–47. Print. Holzer, Jenny. “Jenny Holzer: ‘For 7 World Trade’ and ‘Redaction Paintings.’” ART21. PBS, n.d. Web. Keniston, Ann, and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, eds. Literature after 9/11. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue. 1967. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print. Lethem, Jonathan. Chronic City. New York: Random House, 2009. Print. ———. The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. New York: Random House, 2011. Print. ———. “Jonathan Lethem on Chronic City.” Guardian. Guardian News and Media, March 30, 2010. Web. ———. They Live. Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull, 2010. Print. Peacock, James. Jonathan Lethem. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012. Print. Simpson, David. “Telling It Like It Isn’t.” In Literature after 9/11, edited by Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, 209–23. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

NOTES 1. Lethem so compellingly describes chaldrons that I confess, in a response that would please him, to Googling them—and, finding nothing, seeing my uncertainty reflected in the story, where Perkus, hip to the personally constructed irreality of the Internet, places lies in the Wikipedia entry for Marlon Brando rather than admit his artistic hero has died. 2. Lethem includes Dickens among the writers “I’m always thinking about . . . because they were so original in forming my view of things” (Clarke 172). 3. In 2001, in terms that ring true for this suggestiveness about Chase as artist, Lethem calls himself “just fond enough of metafictional moves to want to tease at them constantly, without quite committing overt metafiction” (Clarke 33). 4. Lethem considered removing Obstinate Dust after Wallace’s suicide, but it “was as though I’d be erasing him.” Lethem amplified the references instead (Clarke 173).

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5. This choice was not without ideological strain: the developer, Larry A. Silverstein, balking at the architect’s choice of Holzer, insisted that his wife screen Holzer’s textual selections. Holzer agreed, and Klara Silverstein removed several she calls “too graphic,” feeling “they would bring back images that people might want to forget” (Collins).

THREE “Never Give a Good Politician Time to Pray” Stephen King’s Treatment of Political Power and Community Involvement in Under the Dome Tamara Watkins

Stephen King’s Under the Dome provides an allegory for the events that occurred on September 11, 2001, as well as those that followed, whether on domestic or foreign soil. The novel’s retelling of the events do not faithfully follow the historical timeline; instead, the events are remediated into a jumbled fiction. This disorganization of how the events were and are processed reflects the American reaction to September 11. When we, as a nation, reflect on that day and its aftermath, it is sometimes difficult to keep track of what occurred, who perpetrated events, and what the motivations for actions were. Also, it is at times difficult to separate reaction and rhetoric from actual events. Not all of the text offers a one-to-one analogy for post–September 11 America; however, King embeds his commentary in numerous places in the text. Under the Dome is an incredibly long, complex text. It is far beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss each aspect of the text that deserves analysis and interpretation. Thus, I have decided to focus on four topics: the dome, including its symbolic meaning; the role of religion in the plot; response to the dome, including reactions by members of the government and citizens; and the concept of empathy. Each of these topics is connected to the others, and together they form a (liberal) response to events that occurred in post-9/ 11 America. This novel provides King, his readers, with the opportunity 29

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to participate in a story that has a (relatively) tidy and satisfying ending, a significant departure from the quagmire that post-9/11 domestic and foreign policy has become. Through the discussion of this text, we can better understand how America functions—both domestically and geopolitically—in a post–September 11th world. Much of Under the Dome’s plot involves people coming to terms with their new reality: the deaths of people involved in Dome Day accidents, individuals not knowing whether they will see their loved ones again, and citizens not understanding what exactly happened to their town, in part due to politicians’ willful obfuscation. This mirrors Americans’ reactions to September 11. The good townsfolk of Chester’s Mill spend a majority of the novel’s plot struggling to understand what the dome is, how it works, who is responsible for it. Chester’s Mill citizens also struggle to deal with the breakdown of society and paranoia that the dome brings—abuse from an unaccountable police; various nefarious political machinations by the town’s true political leader, Big Jim Rennie; and the demonization of individuals perceived to be political rivals. Early in the novel, King establishes that the government, while not responsible for the dome, is filled with individuals who are either incompetent or evil. Chester’s Mill’s citizens are at the mercy, in many ways, of their government; these citizens, not the government, ultimately save their community from destruction. By constructing the plot thus, King captures both the ongoing and growing distrust the American public has for its government as well as provides a bit of wish fulfillment for Americans—they, not the government they distrust, have the ability to set their society on the correct path. This tension between distrusting one’s government and trusting one’s fellow citizens is a fundamental aspect of the post-9/11 American experience. A large dome impassively encompasses sleepy Chester’s Mill, trapping residents in a rapidly declining society. The dome descends on Chester’s Mill on a Saturday morning; the town’s citizens are separated from the rest of the world for an indeterminate amount of time. For much of the book, the dome is a mystery—no one understands its origin, its purpose, or how to dismantle it. Citizens’ interpersonal conflicts are magnified as time goes on, and familiarity (and proximity) breeds contempt and conflict. The dome exacerbates the town’s preexisting problems, magnifying what would otherwise be hidden or ignored. Thus, the dome wreaks havoc on tiny Chester’s Mill, in emotional, physical, and political ways. The dome functions as a symbol in two ways: it represents the attacks that occurred on September 11, and it represents the domestic changes instigated by those attacks. The novel opens with a scene set in a Seneca V that soars above Chester’s Mill. Claudette Sanders, wife of the town’s First Selectman, is in the middle of a flying lesson. As Claudette proclaims that it is a “beautiful

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goddamn day,” the reader learns that Claudette and her flying partner, Chuck Thompson, have only forty seconds left to live (King 4). In less than a minute, life in Chester’s Mill will change forever. The invisible dome descends directly in the flight path of the Seneca V. The plane crashes into the dome, exploding in midair. Smoke billows from the wreckage and debris falls to the earth (12). After the crash, one of the novel’s protagonists, Dale “Barbie” Barbara, watches fire and “body parts” fall from the sky (6). From early in their dome experience, Chester’s Mill residents see the dome as a bringer of death and destruction. Much like on September 11, 2001, a plane crashing into a structure is the first sign that many residents see that indicates that their lives have irrevocably changed in Chester’s Mill. The panic and confusion that onlookers feel when witnessing the plane crash, and the inconsistency between the peaceful skies and destruction occurring overhead (12–14), mirror what citizens saw in New York City. The Seneca V crash is similar to the crashes of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 into the World Trade Center’s north and south towers, respectively. Much like Barbie, residents of New York City looked on as planes crashed into structures over their heads, watching debris and body parts rain down, trying to make sense of a senseless event (14). The plane leaves a black smudge on the dome, a reminder of that first indication that something has happened (6), much like the smoking remains of the WTC served as a lasting reminder of that fateful day for weeks. The dome disrupts air travel in the Chester’s Mill area; it also disrupts travel over land by preventing citizens from entering or leaving the small town. The dome as a physical object delineating the physical boundaries of Chester’s Mill provides an analogy for the lockdown mentality that America immediately adopted post–September 11. Similarly, the specter of terrorism impeded travel to destinations outside of the United States. Although Americans certainly could (in most cases) leave their country if desired, unlike their Chester’s Mill counterparts, the travel restrictions imposed by the Bush administration made traveling to countries more difficult than it had been before the War on Terror began. The dome also physically harms Chester’s Mill’s residents. In addition to trapping pollution caused by residents’ vehicles, it also creates an environment in which a manmade firestorm rages, which causes significant damage to physical structures (King 986–87) and kills a number of residents (King 997). Individuals lucky enough to be located outside of the dome watch helplessly as Chester’s Mill’s remaining townsfolk choke on polluted air (1013). This part of Under the Dome’s plot is an exaggeration of the pollution that New Yorkers dealt with during the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, but it provides readers who did not experience the “dirty, smoky wind” in post–September 11 New York City with a sort of comparison (Vowell 160). Although New Yorkers’ exposure to post-at-

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tack pollution was, largely, not as severe as their Chester’s Mill counterparts, their city was filled with smoke and debris after the attacks on September 11 (Vowell 160). By increasing the degree to which Chester’s Mill residents experienced post-attack pollution, King can force his readers to consider how, even after an attack is over, its aftereffects linger in the air, choking the public as the government looks on, unable to help them in any significant way. Air currents, not human activity, swept away the pollution caused by smoldering wreckage. King also examines the role religion plays in American culture. However, he focuses on the role Christian fundamentalism occupies in American culture and political rhetoric. King has long been critical of fundamentalist Christianity. This strong critique, bordering on a rebuke, has appeared in a number of his novels, including Carrie (1974) and Cell (2006), but King’s censure of the power evangelical Christianity wields in contemporary America is, by far, more biting and pointed in Under the Dome than in his previous novels. In Chester’s Mill, the dome might be the most recent, and visible (metaphorically speaking), source of the town’s problems, but fundamentalist Christianity has long been the vehicle through which bad deeds are done and justified in this tiny town. Although it is a town that only has around a couple of thousand residents (King 997), Chester’s Mill has two pastors. Piper Libby, the mild-mannered reverend of First Congregational Church, lost her faith but not her desire to serve her fellow Chester’s Mill residents (157). The other reverend, Lester Coggins, a self-flagellating fire-and-brimstone preacher, “believed to the point of martyrdom or madness (both words for the same thing, perhaps)” (157). While Libby works for the greater good and survives the dome experience, Coggins neither works to help his fellow citizens nor survives life under the dome. Coggins is complicit in Big Jim’s meth-manufacturing operation, run in the local Christian radio station, WCIK (W–Christ Is King) (King 291). Big Jim and his son, Junior, kill Coggins during a bout of demented father–son bonding when Coggins becomes too much of a liability (293). King’s point is clear: religion cannot guarantee one’s safety, especially if monetary gain is involved. If we take Chester’s Mill’s politicians to be an analogy for national leaders, this message also recasts the George W. Bush administration’s use of religious rhetoric in a decidedly negative, and threatening, light. The meth-manufacturing business is appalling enough, but it also provides the foundation for the most destructive act in the book. Chef, who rhapsodizes about meth in religious terms (671, 789), is responsible for the explosion that fills the area inside the dome with smoke and debris and kills a majority of Chester’s Mill residents (980). This event occurs after Chef joins up with Andy Sanders, “an idiot” (49), the grieving town’s First Selectman, and Big Jim’s boss (on paper at least), and the two have been using an alarming amount of meth. They engage in a gun battle with the Chester’s Mill Police Department. For Chef and Andy,

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these acts of violence are committed in religious terms (973). Andy’s dimwitted persona, tendency to speak in religious terms, and history of substance abuse make him an unmistakable allegory for George W. Bush. King deftly channels (liberal) American anxieties regarding the ability and stability of our leaders into Andy, making him representative both of perceptions of George W. Bush and of larger American concerns regarding what happens when arms, religion, substance abuse, and easily influenced people wield considerable political power. Meth manufacturing and New Testament allusions aside, Chef is clearly intended to be an allegory for the extremists who perpetrated the September 11 attacks as well subsequent suicide bombers who attacked targets on American and foreign soil. Chef’s religious fervor, unchecked by critical thinking and rationality, shapes his worldview and compels him to perpetrate a violent act that kills thousands of individuals. This event—the mass destruction of both manmade structures and human lives that leaves Chester’s Mill inhospitable and polluted with toxic fumes—occurs on national television. Here, it seems, King offers commentary on the impotence of national media to do anything worthwhile to prevent violence; instead, media passively records and reports as destruction occurs. 1 Under the Dome contains other religious fundamentalist characters. These characters are uniformly depicted as evil. Much of Big Jim’s public persona is based around his born-again “Christian” beliefs. He “had given his heart to Jesus at age sixteen” (65), and religious rhetoric bloats his political speeches (858–59). Big Jim’s version of Christianity, though, is as toxic as the methamphetamine manufactured in WCIK. Big Jim uses religious rhetoric more than any other character, including the novel’s two ministers. Big Jim is Under the Dome’s Big Bad. This cannot be a coincidence. Also, Big Jim’s personal body count—whether due to direct action (murdering people, including Brenda Perkins, once she uncovers his meth operation, and Reverend Coggins) or indirect action (employing noted violent meth cook Chef)—is higher than any other character. Again, King makes the connection between religious rhetoric and unethical behavior clear to his readers. Through the character development and actions of Big Jim and Chef, King warns readers about the manner in which religious profession can be used as a way to justify or conceal violence and unethical behavior. Big Jim’s heart problems (100), as well as being the person who truly wields power in local government (50), make him an obvious caricature of Dick Cheney. However, Big Jim is also representative of the George W. Bush administration more generally. Although Cheney’s religious rhetoric was minimal, the George W. Bush administration largely grounded its actions in evangelical Christian rhetoric. Robert L. Ivie explains, “As a medium of American war culture, Bush spoke to a Christian America in the language of a Christian man crusading for a righteous cause by de-

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claring an unrestricted war on evil,” and “the integrating theme of Bush’s post-9/11 presidency was that any and all means were justified by holy ends in what amounted to a redemptive war on Islamic terrorism” (223–24). Much like George W. Bush and his administration, Big Jim attempts to situate himself in the secular world of politics while still invoking religious themes. King seems to be critical of politicians who cloak their violent tendencies in religious rhetoric—whether these individuals are the Second Selectman of a sleepy Maine town or a member of a presidential administration. Big Jim does not need to be a one-to-one representation of a single person. In fact, King’s commentary on the Bush administration is stronger if Big Jim can represent more than one individual. Like his Bush administration counterparts, Big Jim often invokes the idea of terrorism when it is politically expedient (King 663). The first time Big Jim uses the word “terrorism,” he does so when speaking with a local farmer and a police officer at the Seneca V site. Big Jim states, “I don’t want to say there’s terrorism involved . . . but I won’t say there isn’t” (72). However, it soon becomes apparent that “terrorism” is a word that Chester’s Mill’s primary political leader uses to strike fear in the hearts of his town’s citizens and vilify individuals with whom he has an unrelated ax to grind. Big Jim’s use of this word, and its myriad implications, takes on a decidedly darker meaning. Big Jim uses the dome and its assumed connection to terrorism as a way to demonize individuals whom he opposes. Soon, “terrorism” becomes a word that carries with it the subtext of impending threats and the need to dispose of rival leaders. Big Jim uses the dome—and its indeterminate origin—as a tool in his quest to maintain his political stranglehold on Chester’s Mill. This is evident when he says to Julia, the editor of the local newspaper, “If you can bring yourself to consider the idea that Dale Barbara and his friends were the ones who set up the Dome in the first place, I think it makes perfect sense. It was an act of terrorism, pure and simple” (633). This is much like how the George W. Bush administration used the mere idea of “terrorism” to shepherd, if not manipulate, the American population. The perpetuation of the country being in a constant state of emergency led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Advisory System. 2 The way in which Big Jim uses the specter of terrorism to demonize those he views as threats also has Bush-era correlations; it is very similar to how the Bush administration used the specter of terrorism to drum up support for the invasion of Iraq. Branding Barbie a “terrorist”—or at least planting that in the mind of a member of the media—is much like how the Bush administration labored to convince people that Saddam Hussein and Iraqi nationals were partially responsible for the events of September 11, despite lacking evidence to support this claim (350).

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Big Jim provides King with the opportunity to engage in wish fulfillment. While one would be reluctant to assert that Stephen King would like to see Dick Cheney die a painful death, writing this sort of ending for Cheney’s literary equivalent would certainly provide a therapeutic outlet for an individual who holds liberal political views and, thus, likely has been repeatedly dismayed by the George W. Bush administration’s actions. In addition to running the local government, Big Jim is also instrumental in building Chester’s Mill’s police force. After the dome causes police chief Duke Perkins’s pacemaker to malfunction (King 81), Peter Randolph becomes the acting chief of police (128). Big Jim uses his relationship with Randolph to his advantage, convincing him to hire more police officers. These new, voluntary recruits include Big Jim’s mentally ill son, Junior, and a number of Junior’s degenerate friends (135). These young police officers do not protect and serve; instead, they rape and intimidate, drunk with unchecked power. These officers, whose actions conflict with their social and legal responsibility to protect others, mock victims (283–84, 931–32). I posit that King intends the Chester’s Mill Police Department to be a metaphor for the various nefarious aspects of post–September 11 law enforcement and military conduct. 3 The Chester’s Mill Police Department morphs into an appalling group of individuals mad with power and loosely controlled by their superiors. One cannot help but interpret this as King’s commentary on the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal (Draper 229). Like their fictional counterparts, the individuals who perpetrated the actions in Abu Ghraib were young and charged with the responsibility of “protecting” their community. Their actions, like those of their Chester’s Mill counterparts, demonstrate that even people who choose to join the military are capable of appalling actions. They serve as a reminder that ongoing conflict and “war” can warp one’s perspective about the humanity of other people and the dignity that everyone, regardless of ethnicity or gender, deserves. These actions received tacit sanctioning from the government and superior officers—if only by a lack of punishment before the abuse became known to the American public—mirrors the evolution of police brutality in Chester’s Mill; no Chester’s Mill officers were reprimanded, thus allowing them to abuse citizens with impunity. However, Chester’s Mill reporters were unable to widely disseminate information to the public about these actions, these abuses continued unabated. Thus, Under the Dome also becomes a strongly pro-journalist text, indicating the necessity of a free press that is able to report unsettling stories and create an informed public. However, lest I portray King as a military-hating liberal bent on portraying members of the armed forces as sociopaths, I need to point out that one of the novel’s protagonists—Dale “Barbie” Barbara—is a former soldier (whose rank is both reinstated and quickly promoted) (152–53). King’s commentary about the horrors of war and its aftermath inform

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Barbie’s character development, but they make him a sympathetic character. King crafts an allegory of the more nefarious aspects of post–September 11th American culture, but through Barbie, as well as local journalist Julia Shumway and teenager “Scarecrow Joe” McClatchey, King notes the value of being socially engaged and community oriented. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Barbie’s precise role in the torture of “a weeping Iraqi man, naked save for his unraveling keffiyeh” is omitted (185). King likens post-dome Chester’s Mill to “Fallujah, Takrit, Hilla, Mosul, and Baghdad” (585), demonstrating that war is hell regardless of where it occurs, and that war can occur on domestic soil, not just foreign soil. King does not explicitly state what role Barbie had in these events so that he can remain a sympathetic character. This ambiguity provides Barbie with an unclear past, making him as mysterious as the dome he labors to dismantle. It also forces Barbie to be a victim of his circumstances, including the mania that comes from warmongering and group think. King also suggests that witnessing atrocities makes soldiers question whether they want to be soldiers (184). Thus, King presents a nuanced approach to the ethics and psychology of war and soldiers. Barbie is out of the system that Chester’s Mill’s police force are in; he can understand the ethical implications of abusing those over whom he has power because he has distance from the situation in which he found himself. King’s treatment of Barbie is nuanced and very sympathetic to veterans as well as active duty soldiers. Barbie is conscripted, despite having been discharged from the military. He tossed his medals in the Gulf of Mexico (152), ready to leave his military experience, both positive and negative, in the past. Barbie’s character development demonstrates that King—and arguably a number of “regular citizens” who do not write novels—are a lot more forgiving of veterans’ actions during wartime than politicians’ subterfuge that led to the wars. This is not to claim that veterans are blameless for their actions during wartime; however, Under the Dome demonstrates that guileful politicians, not War on Terror veterans, are the real villains. Barbie’s willingness to reenlist (although perhaps he really did not have a choice) also demonstrates his desire to be a contributing member in his community. This interest Barbie has in his community is more important than, and helps atone for, his wartime actions. King also has a nuanced approach to how he depicts journalists. Much like his depiction of members of law enforcement and the military, journalists either labor to disseminate information to the public or seem to cover events because they are “current” but do not seem invested in this work. When Chester’s Mill’s newspaper The Democrat, owned by Julia Shumway, is deemed “not in the town’s best interest,” Big Jim enlists his son to help bomb the building in which the newspaper staff works (514). After successfully executing this plan, Big Jim attempts to blame Barbie for the crime, but Julia does not believe him (632–33). Unlike her national

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news counterparts who witness destruction but do not experience it, Julia is present for the destructive fire that sweeps through Chester’s Mill. National news networks’ cameras capture “a monstrous column of black smoke and swirling debris on the horizon” (982), but Julia experiences this event firsthand. Julia is keenly aware of her paper’s role in the community. People might make fun of Pete Freeman’s grainy black-and-white photos and the Democrat’s exhaustive coverage of such local fetes as Mill Middle School’s Enchanted Night dance; they might claim its only practical use was as a cat-box liner—but they needed it, especially when something bad happened. Julia meant to see that they had it tomorrow, even if she had to stay up all night. (120)

The fact that Julia is so invested in the paper gives insight into how King perceives local news media. King seems to be asserting that local journalists, those who truly know the region in which they report, are best able to report on local events. Also, King has embedded a sharp criticism of the relationship between the George W. Bush administration and the press into the text. When individuals objected to the Bush administration’s claims regarding weapons of mass destruction, “the U.S. mainstream media ignored that challenge, did not cover it,” and “appeared more as ‘staterun’ media than as free and critical media” (Hashem 156). Unlike these examples of real-life media, Shumway’s Democrat dared to challenge its government and cover topics that might not depict government officials and their actions positively. In this way, the Democrat’s fiery fate serves as a warning of the potential consequences of such actions. Likewise, well-documented cases exist of journalists facing pushback from government officials based on the content of their articles and personal views. Some journalists, such as Adam Clymer, are subjected to public character assassination when they are critical of the government (Draper 108). Dale and Julia are adults, and therefore it is reasonable to attempt to engage in the community in which they live. Fascinatingly, King includes a teen character in the novel, Joe McClatchey, who is also communityminded. In a number of ways, he acts as the optimistic, politically aware conscience of the book. Joe is actually more ambitious than Big Jim, aspiring to be the president of the United States (178–79), not simply a Selectman. However, Joe’s political ambitions push him to search for truth, not manipulate and harm others. He and his friends post signs that read “END THE SECRECY, STOP THE EXPERIMENT, FREE CHESTER’S MILL, etc., etc.” (179). These signs do little to increase Joe’s knowledge of what the dome is and why it exists around Chester’s Mill, but they signify Joe’s, and his fellow teens’, interest in their community and current events.

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Through Joe, King seems to be stating that America’s young people are its best hope for a better future. These individuals have not yet been corrupted by institutionalized fear mongering, violence, or political power plays and as a result have the most potential to contribute to American society. One wonders, though, if these young individuals will grow out of their interest in civics, if they will become cynical, if they can possibly retain their exuberance for truth and fairness, once they have mortgages and student loans to pay. Despite these potential negative outcomes, King’s message is deeply hopeful and optimistic by demonstrating that civically engaged young citizens might be the individuals who are best equipped and able to help their fellow citizens and thus help their society recover from cultural traumas. Joe is the opposite of the “leatherhead” alien children that caused the dome to descend on Chester’s Mill. The alien children, watching the humans in their makeshift vivarium, laugh “in obscenely childish conspiracy” (735). When the aliens are in a group, they are not interested in making life better for those around them; instead, they treat humans as if they are toys. 4 Convincing one of the aliens to feel empathetic for humans is the key to removing the dome. Thus, Under the Dome, during its last dozen pages, becomes a treatise on the importance of empathy. When Julia manages to catch a lone alien child watching the trapped humans, Julia speaks with the alien. During this conversation, the alien transforms from impassive observer to empathetic listener. Julia’s impassioned argument that she, and her fellow humans, are not “toys from the toyshop” forces the alien to doubt her perception of humans (1060). However, Julia’s ability to force the alien to experience one of her childhood traumas helps convince the alien that humans deserve respect and are not toys. In the memory that Julia shares with the alien child, Julia is beaten up by her female classmates. As she stands in the bandstand in her underwear, bleeding and crying, Julia sees one of the bullies, Kayla, walking toward her. The alien child and Kayla merge in Julia’s mind (1062–63). The alien, as Kayla, gives Julia a sweater and tells her, “Wear it home, it’ll look like a dress” (1071). Through this telepathic connection, the alien learns that Julia and the other humans trapped under the dome are beings with personal histories, traumas, and emotions; they are beings who have the right to be alive (1063). At that moment, the dome lifts, freeing the humans and allowing clean air to rush into the town (King 1065). King’s message is clear: the key to ending violence is to have empathy and recognize others’ right to exist. Under the Dome is a dark text, certainly, but it is also unapologetically optimistic. Its darkness and sanguineness are entwined. This ending is a bit trite, but it speaks volumes about how truly hopeful Under the Dome is. While it is deeply critical of conservative, religious politicians and those who use their power to perpetrate crimes on innocent people, the text also highlights the ways in which people can learn from trauma and

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tragedy. Both Barbie and Julia confront the trauma they experienced before the dome descended on Chester’s Mill in order to convince their captor that they are both real and worthy of being freed. In this way, King captures the American emotional response to September 11. Fallujah is mentioned ten times in Under the Dome and each time with respect to Barbie’s experience. Thus, King makes the Iraq War deeply personal, not simply an abstract concept. King’s commentary seems to be that the people who are sent to fight wars—especially those targeted at members of the Axis of Evil—come back irreparably changed. Published in November 2009 and (mostly) written during the Bush administration, the text seems to be King’s way of dealing with the violence, hollow religious rhetoric, and xenophobia that plagued the United States after September 11. Although it is not a perfect, one-to-one analogy of the events and aftermath of September 11, Under the Dome provides readers with a new way of understanding and interpreting the significance of that day, as well as its cultural and ideological aftermath. Under the Dome provides readers with insight into the (liberal) perspective of life in America during the years immediately following September 11, 2001, that will undoubtedly continue to serve as both a reminder of what American culture was like and instructions for how to repair it. WORKS CITED Cruz, Gilbert. “Q&A: Talking with Stephen King.” Time. Time, Inc., November 23, 2007. Web. May 20, 2014. Draper, Robert. Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. New York: Free Press, 2007. Print. Flynn, Stephen E., and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. “End of the Joyride: Confronting the New Homeland Security Imperative in the Age of Globalization.” Center for Global Change and Governance at Rutgers University, Newark, NJ. April 7, 2003. Hashem, Mahboub E. “War on Iraq and Media Coverage: A Middle Eastern Perspective.” In War, Media, and Propaganda: A Global Perspective, edited by Yahya R. Kamalipour and Nancy Snow, 147–69. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Print. Ivie, Robert L. “Fighting Terror by Rite of Redemption and Reconciliation.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10, no. 2 (2007): 221–48. Khan, Mussarat, and Kathryn Ecklund. “Attitudes toward Muslim Americans.” Journal of Muslim Mental Health, 7, no. 1 (2012): 1–16. King, Stephen. Under the Dome: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2009. Kindle edition. Vowell, Sarah. The Partly Cloudy Patriot. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Print. “You Are Either with Us or against Us.” CNN. Time Warner, November 6, 2001. Web. May 20, 2014.

NOTES 1. In truth, King’s assessment of media is a bit more nuanced than I indicate. I will revisit King’s treatment of journalists later in this chapter. 2. It is fascinating that this chart has been conspicuously absent from American culture during the Obama administration.

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3. I am in no way stating that all law enforcement officers and/or members of the military are abusive, mentally ill, etc. This assertion would be both offensive and patently false. 4. This seems to be an indictment of group psychology, as well as the “us vs. them” mentality that shaped foreign policy during the George W. Bush administration.

FOUR Which Came First, Zombies or the Plague? Colson Whitehead’s Zone One as Post-9/11 Allegory Anne Canavan

Zombies have become the popular culture darlings of the twenty-first century, obscuring the political and social problems for which zombies have always been metaphors. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) is teeming with zombies, both fast and slow, but the novel is not the actionfilled gore-fest that has become so popular in media like The Walking Dead, World War Z, and even Plants vs. Zombies but rather a critique of narrative realities that have dominated the post-9/11 world, and the consequences of the national agenda to doggedly pretend that life in a post9/11 world can and should be exactly like the America that came before. In Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel, Kristiann Versluys discusses the difficulty that writers faced when they were asked by newspapers and other media for their thoughts immediately after the tragedy. While realistic post-9/11 fiction is well represented by authors such as DeLillo, for Versluys, the only narrative approach to 9/11 is for it to be “limned as a silhouette, expressible only through allegory and indirection” (14), just as zombies have always been symbols of larger social ills. As writing is inherently an empathetic task, writers had to resist the strong impulse to take the easy road offered by the rhetoric of George W. Bush of dividing the world into stark categories of good and evil. However, writers were not the only ones concerned with how to tell the story of 9/11; politicians created an avalanche of narratives designed to other a faceless enemy and to bind the nation together in a tidal wave of fear and 41

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patriotism. In Zone One, Whitehead’s characters are embroiled in a world of competing narratives, narratives which place them as both hero and victim, lead performer and faceless janitor, survivor and walking dead. As Mark Spitz, the narrator, attempts to negotiate and create narratives to interpret his new reality, he is simultaneously acted upon by governmental narratives about the tragedy and recovery. Much has been said, and likely will be said, about the connections between zombies and 9/11 in terms of paranoia and the search for visible enemies. Kyle Bishop argues that 9/11 set off paranoid impulses in people unmatched since the McCarthy era, and Whitehead himself echoes this fear in an interview with the Atlantic, “For me, the terror of the zombie is that at any moment, your friend, your family, your neighbor, your teacher, the guy at the bodega down the street, can be revealed as the monster they’ve always been” (Fassler). The fear of terrorists, people who looked like us but were secretly monsters, found ready expression in the explosion of zombie narratives since the tragedy. Peter Dendle argues that 9/ 11’s significance to the zombie-narrative revival was less about the nature of the tragedy and more about scale: “The possibility of wide-scale destruction and devastation which 9/11 brought once again into the communal consciousness found a ready narrative expression in the zombie apocalypses which over thirty years had honed images of desperation subsistence and amoral survivalism to a fine edge” (quoted in Stratton 269). All of these points certainly apply to the oeuvre of zombie narratives in general, but they add little to understanding the complex narrative realities of Whitehead’s novel. Zone One is a novel about the corrupting power of stories, and the primary story that drives the characters in the novel is that most American of narratives, hope, combined with the new American master narrative, fear. Regardless of how dire the situations, characters plan for the days after the apocalypse, days when they can return to the way things were before. While Spitz evinces skepticism about people’s postapocalypse dreams, telling himself, “Hope is a gateway drug, don’t do it” (222), he still engages in the same efforts; by continuing to fight, by moving from one refuge to another, and ultimately by helping to clean Manhattan of the skels and stragglers (the terms for the two distinct categories of zombies), he moves forward because of hope. However, the hope that propels him is in part biological as he instinctively resists his own destruction, partly narcissistic as he comes to the conclusion that he cannot die, and largely manufactured by Buffalo (the new national capital), as part of the bread and circus campaign of reconstruction. Spitz’s hope, however, is also inextricably linked with fear, his natural fear of the zombies but also a fear of the reestablishment of old racial tensions. As Ramón Saldívar writes about Zone One, “With the near-total annihilation of humanity has come as well the near elimination of racial difference and of racial strife, as if only a complete and total destruction of contem-

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porary life will allow for the end of the color line” (13). While the immediate aftermath of the plague has brought people together, momentarily erasing previous racial tensions and prejudices, Spitz recognizes that once Buffalo establishes the new America, designed to be a perfect mirror of the previous society, he and the other sweepers are likely to be swept away themselves to a ghetto-ized corner of the shining city. At his core, Mark Spitz is a man controlled by stories. Stories are the mechanism through which he understands himself and the world, and even his name, Mark Spitz, is a two-part nickname given to him during his most heroic moment, when, rather than follow his fellow survivors into the river to escape an oncoming rush of zombies, he staged a heroic stand on the top of an abandoned car, killing the zombies that threaten to overwhelm his position: He could not die. This was his world now, in all its sublime crumminess, where intellect and ingenuity and talent were as equally meaningless as stubbornness, cowardice, and stupidity. . . . He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. He had the ammo. He took them all down. (182–83)

After the event, he tells his comrades that he didn’t jump into the river because he didn’t know how to swim, earning him the ironic nickname of Mark Spitz. However, “he had no fear of the water, not with his dependable comrades down there, and his undimmed halo of luck. He knew a few strokes” (182). Rather, he stayed to fight because of his sudden belief in a new story. By accepting the nickname, Spitz allows himself to be viewed by his fellow survivors via another narrative—the “black-peoplecan’t-swim” story. Spitz is content to let other people view him through an inaccurate framework of racial stereotypes; he does not share his sudden and devout belief that he cannot die in this new world, that he is finally the leading character in his own story. However, this belief in a narrative provides little armor in Whitehead’s naturalistic world; what the belief does do, though, is keep characters moving forward. In the face of incredible odds, only the belief in a narrative makes Spitz continue to fight. Mark Spitz also introduces the reader to the idea of Last Night, the final point in time before a character’s world changed into the new, postapocalyptic reality forever, and the practice of telling Last Night stories as a way of introducing yourself to other survivors. This sharp dichotomy between past and present parallels strongly with David Bromwich’s argument that the primary message after 9/11 was “history begins on 9/ 11.” The relationship between Last Night stories and 9/11 is both apparent and tragic; after 9/11, all Americans suddenly had their own Last Night stories, a common cultural touchstone of “where were you when

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the Towers fell?” In both cases, the tragedy brought people of every background together in the experience of shared trauma but also in an exercise of collective myth-making. Beyond the simple fact of shared experience forming a basis for a relationship, in a very real way, these stories construct the reality of the situation both for the teller and the listener: “Each retelling of one’s Last Night story was a step toward another fantastic refuge, that of truth. Mark Spitz had refined his Last Night story into three versions. The Silhouette was for survivors he wasn’t going to travel with for long. . . . He offered the Anecdote, robust and carrying more on its ribs, to those he might hole up with for a night” (138–39), while “the Obituary, although refined over the months and not without a rehearsed air, was nonetheless heartfelt, glancing off his true self more than once” (139). It is only in the Obituary that Spitz touches on his “true self,” but it is also apparent that his “true self” is highly constructed by the telling of the Obituary. Unlike Spitz’s belief that he cannot die in this new reality, a belief that he is willing to stake his life on but not share with others, the Obituary is a public story, told when “both speaker and listener, sharer and receiver, wanted to be remembered. The Obit got it all down for some calm, distant day when you were long disappeared and a stranger took the time to say your name” (139). In this new world, there are no funerals, so the living tell their own obituaries, crafting the way they want to be remembered before their eventual, but always imminent, demise. This sense of fatalism mirrors the new realities of post-9/11 America, as the national myth of America’s invulnerability to attack crumbled and was replaced by constant reminders of how afraid to be, conveniently color-coded by the Department of Homeland Security. However, even the bottom threat level, green, still is classified as “low threat,” emphasizing that in this new reality, there is always something to fear. While the threats of imminent destruction are less pressing outside of the narrative world, Last Night stories are an important part of the 9/11 Tribute Center in New York City as well. Situated next to the newly opened 9/11 Memorial Museum in the footprint of the North Tower, “All 600 of the Tribute Center’s docents are survivors, victims’ family members, first responders, volunteers who helped in the aftermath or people who lived in the area. On each tour, volunteer docents tell their personal stories, which, over the years, have deeply affected visitors and volunteers alike” (quoted in Hiatt). However, the role of the museum is more complex, as “‘It’s harder at the 9/11 museum, because the political narrative and the emotional narrative are still being negotiated,’ said Sonnet Takahisa, who worked briefly as the museum’s director of education” (quoted in Hiatt). The competing nature of these narratives, which are still very much in development, highlights the signifying importance of Last Night stories, both real and fictional. When Joseph Nye discusses the power of narratives as tools used by terrorists to convey their message,

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he inadvertently points to the work done by the government in the post9/11 world as well: “Analysts often assume that victory goes to the side with more force or hard power, but in an information age success also depends on who has the better story. Competing narratives matter. Terrorism is about narrative and political drama.” Nye’s argument applies to intentionally crafted narratives, often designed to dehumanize the Enemy and to make otherwise inexplicable events makes sense (terrorists hate America because they are jealous of our freedom). In these sorts of tales, heroic but still everyday, handsome but not too handsome, young men and women make their stands against the evil that is trying to overcome them (Zombieland, 28 Days Later, Dead Snow), often in a humorously gruesome fashion (“Zombie Kill of the Week”). However, Whitehead’s treatment of the tried-and-true zombie story does not provide catharsis at the death of easily identifiable, shambling, sub-intelligent, terrorist stand-ins. While Mark Spitz stills views the skels and stragglers with an “it’s-them-or-me” hostility, and occasionally views himself in a noble role, liberating the bodies from their quasilife, what makes these zombies different from other treatments is the level of humanization that Mark Spitz ascribes to them, creating elaborate backstories for them. While more traditional zombie narratives often have a scene or two where a main character is forced to put down a reanimated friend or family member, the largest number of enemies that he or she faces are the nameless, story-less horde, meant simply to die so the audience can applaud. When Whitehead’s zombies die, the reader doesn’t feel like cheering. Rather, one begins to identify with Spitz’s characterization of these stragglers and begins to realize that maybe not all the zombies that Spitz encounters are undead and that danger comes from both sides of the Wall. It is through these musings that the reader begins to see the dual nature of survivors and victims emerge and commentary on not only the problematic narratives that emerged post 9/11, but also preexisting national narratives of American exceptionalism as well. The first zombie that Spitz describes is a skel that he calls the Marge. This skel, who is in the process of attacking Spitz as he mentally creates her backstory, has a hairdo made popular by a television actress shortly before Last Night. From this observation, Spitz fills in a number of details: The legions of young ladies who fled their stunted towns and municipalities to reinvent themselves in the Big City recognized something in her flailings, and fetishized this piece of her. They had been reeled in by the old lie of making a name for oneself in the city; now they had to figure out how to survive. Hunt-and-gather rent money, forage ramen. In this week’s written-up clubs and small-plate eateries, loose flocks of Marges were invariably underfoot, sipping cinnamon-rimmed novelty cocktails and laughing too eagerly. (17)

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By creating narratives for these people, Spitz changes how he, and the reader, view his actions and reinforces the skels’ roles as victims rather than the enemy: “He was performing an act of mercy. These things might have been people he knew, not-quites and almost-could-be’s, they were somebody’s family and they deserved release from their blood sentence. He was an angel of death ushering these things on their stalled journey from this sphere. Not a mere exterminator eliminating pests” (19). For Spitz, it is only through the construction of narrative that he can reconcile his role in this new world; however, he simultaneously elevates himself from an exterminator to an angel of death, from a simple cog in the machine of the American Phoenix to an indispensable part of the new natural order. Mark Spitz’s emphasis on a reality controlled by narrative coincides perfectly with the reality created and sold by Buffalo in the novel, but it is also tied in with larger national narratives. America has always been a country with narratives at the core of its identity, what Jacqueline Rose calls a “state fantasy.” Donald Pease identifies the guiding national narrative as being that of American exceptionalism, expressed in ideas such as the shining city on the hill of the colonial founders to the virgin-land language that justified manifest destiny to the modern concepts of homeland security. Throughout all of these narratives is the idea that Americans, through their identification with a specific state fantasy and by adding this national layer of identity to an individual’s conception of self, become more than the sum of their parts. Pease develops the problematic nature of this exceptionalism, writing, “American exceptionalism thereafter motivated U.S. citizens to displace their normal national desire—to achieve an ideal nation—with the abnormal desire to propagate the U.S. model of nationalism” (22). It is this desire to participate in a particular state fantasy that has motivated people to immigrate to America; the narrative of American exceptionalism is designed to encourage the belief that being a part of America, even illegally, is better than being a participant in other, competing, state fantasies. To expand Pease’s point, American exceptionalism not only encourages people to propagate U.S. nationalism but also to attempt to become more exceptional than other Americans. Pervasive national narratives such as the Protestant work ethic equate material success with spiritual purity and personal value, and, as a result, the accumulation of wealth is one of the common yard sticks for the success of the American Dream. In this sense, economic success is the ultimate indication of American patriotism. The corollary to this, though, is that poor people must be somehow less American and less worthy than their wealthy counterparts. One needs look no further than the rhetoric surrounding Mitt Romney’s 1 percent campaign comments and national discussions of people receiving public assistance or working minimum wage jobs as being “lazy” or “unmotivated.” These people subvert the

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national narrative that hard work is financially rewarded and that social mobility is the natural outcome of American-ness and must be vilified as being inherently unworthy to participate in the state fantasy. The fantasy is able to perpetuate itself because once those who fail to succeed are painted as “others,” then their failure does not signify a flaw in the system but in the individual. This national narrative of exceptionalism is what drives Spitz, who believes that his own, well-practiced, mediocrity makes him exceptional. It is this belief in national exceptionalism that leads to the creation of the new national headquarters in Buffalo and to the ultimately doomed attempt to take Manhattan back from the dead. Manhattan, the most fabled borough of America’s most famous city, is the ultimate symbol of national myth-making. Manhattan functions as the center of Zone One, literally and figuratively. It is symbol of the American Phoenix, and as the envoy from Buffalo, Ms. Macy, explains to Spitz and his commander, “New York City is the greatest city in the world. Imagine what all those heads of state and ambassadors will feel when they see what we’ve accomplished. You’ve accomplished. We brought this place back from the dead. The symbolism alone. If we can do that, we can do anything” (208). Strategically, Manhattan is almost indefensible, and the zombies themselves seem to feel the pull of the city, piling against the walls in the waves the soldiers nicknamed Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. “He’d [Spitz] always thought it strange, the devotion of the congregation there, as if in their fallen state they still hungered for Manhattan. Then as now, they believed the magic of the island would cure them of their sicknesses” (315). This is a belief shared by all of the characters in the novel, that if Manhattan, that magical island, can be reclaimed, then the old way of life will be within reach once again. The old way of life brings its own set of complications though, and while Manhattan may be the new shining city on the hill, it is also part of New York City, one of the most racially and economically divided places in the country. Even within New York City, Manhattan is where the privileged belong, a fact that Gary, Spitz’s fellow cleaner and professional skeptic, points out: “You think we’re going to end up here? We ain’t special. They’re going to put the rich people here [Manhattan]. Politicians and pro athletes. Those chefs from those cooking shows. . . . They’re going to put us on Staten Island” (89). Even in the post-apocalyptic world, nothing has changed. Manhattan is still for the wealthy, and those who had value in the old world order still maintain their control even though their skill sets are no longer relevant. People like Gary and Spitz are useful for now, the new versions of the undocumented workers who cleaned the World Trade Center and served food to the elite, but when it comes time for them to go home, they are not welcome in the new Manhattan any more than they were in the old. Living in Staten Island is not only a geographic displacement from Manhattan, it is also a social one. When Spitz points

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out to Gary that he should be pleased about moving to an island, Gary replies, “We 1 like islands. Natural defenses. You know we like islands. But we wouldn’t live on Staten Island if they were giving out vaccines and hand jobs right off the ferry” (89). For Gary, being relocated to Staten Island represents not the successful reclamation of Manhattan but the reinscription of old social systems that are built upon the exploitation of people like Spitz and Gary and the end of the temporary truce between black and white, haves and have-nots. As long as the zombies are at the door, Spitz and Gary can sleep in the high-rises and gaze across the vistas of New York (as long as they are careful not to break anything for the real occupants). Just like before the plague, Spitz and Gary are cleaners, allowed to visit the abodes of the wealthy just long enough to remove the trash—the only difference is the trash in this new world are/were human beings. It is within this framework of double victimhood, of being exploited by a system and then forgotten by it, that Zone One stands apart as a racial and cultural commentary, not only on terrorism but also on an economic and social system that lures vulnerable populations, siren-like, to their doom and highlights the post-9/11 aspects of the text. While Hurricane Katrina is widely regarded as the disaster that reminded us that there was still racism in America, 9/11 was less overt in terms of the immediate victims, but the effects of it were perhaps even more widespread if one factors in the hate crimes that were committed by people under the guise of patriotism. Among the roll of victims of 9/11 are the names that we will never know; some bodies were simply impossible to identify, but many others belonged to illegal immigrants working in the World Trade Center, a different sort of anonymous, nameless victim. 2 Employers refused to provide names of these victims for fear of prosecution for hiring undocumented workers, and family members were reluctant to request help from authorities because they feared being deported themselves. While some groups, most notably Asociación Tepeyac, helped identify more than one hundred undocumented workers killed in the Trade Center, and attempted to remind people that it wasn’t only white collar New Yorkers who died that day, these victims are still largely forgotten, and when they are remembered, it is often in efforts to remove their names from the monumental records of the tragedy—in effect, to change the national narrative. Like Gary and Spitz, these undocumented workers after 9/11 were caught in the crossfire of competing narratives. On one hand, America’s narrative of the land of opportunity and a place where exceptionalism would be rewarded drew workers to New York City, the seat of the most glittering of American dreams, and they held up their end of the bargain. They worked hard, doing jobs that native-born Americans refused, and were exploited in their vulnerable positions by unscrupulous employers who refused to pay a decent wage. However, they labored on in the

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hopes that, as promised, hard work and perseverance would be rewarded. However, when the Towers fell, a new national narrative of xenophobia and violent nationalism emerged, catching both undocumented workers and legal citizens in the middle. These people who worked the hardest to make the standard of living inherent to American exceptionalism possible by serving food, running gas stations, and cleaning tall buildings where the wealthy and privileged worked and lived were suddenly the most expendable. Given this, Gary’s dire prediction as they trudge up a high-rise, “sweeping” it for skels so that the leaders in Buffalo can have somewhere to live, seems less cynical than it does prescient. Just as the nameless victims of 9/11 found themselves in a liminal space between opposing narratives, so do Whitehead’s zombies occupy both traditional and modern roles. As David McNally notes the inherent relationship between zombies and capitalist culture: “It was in modern Haiti that zombies acquired their unique meaning as the animated dead, mere flesh and bones, bereft of memory and identity, toiling on behalf of others.” In early films such as White Zombie, as well as traditional voodoo and oral narratives, zombies are literal and figurative slaves. In the late 1960s, zombies became icons for cultural consumerism, most clearly in George Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead. However, Whitehead marries these two tropes, indicting the American consumer culture as the force behind the zombie-fication of people long before they actually become undead. It is the promise of increased consumer power that drives the Marge to come to New York City to slave away at a human relations position so she can achieve her dream of being a “true” New Yorker—a Sex and the City–style consumer. The people, and the skels, that Spitz describes are dead long before the plague arrives, at least for the eight hours a day that their job occupies them. Spitz’s own pre-plague job is the merest ephemera, important only in that it will eventually allow him to fulfill his dream of becoming a New Yorker. It is the kind of job that could only exist in America, a job that requires “no skills,” simply the creation of an ersatz social-media personality, the face of a thinly veiled Starbucks stand-in (183). While Spitz treats the job as if it is simply a means to an end, Whitehead’s stragglers give lie to the fictions Spitz has told himself and reveal the true horror of the American narrative. The stragglers are not the flesh-hungry attackers like the Marge, who stayed in her office because she was locked there by a fleeing survivor; stragglers “were a succession of imponderable tableaux, the malfunctioning stragglers and the places they chose to haunt throughout the Zone and beyond” (60). Even in undeath, these stragglers return to work as copy-repair people or gorilla-suited balloon fillers in a party store, rain or shine, heat or cold. The most troubling assessment is offered by Spitz’s lieutenant, who opines that these stragglers are inhabiting their “perfect moment” perpetually: “They’ve found it—where they belong” (196).

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Stragglers return to places most important to them, pale ghosts frozen in their pre-plague lives, and the tragedy is the number who return, not to their homes or places of leisure but to their jobs. No matter what they may have told themselves in life, in death their truest nature is revealed—not individuals striving for perfection but simply the moving parts of the American Dream machine. This Dream machine, however, can only function when it produces a national narrative that compels its citizens to subordinate their individual desires to the will of the collective. The content of these narratives have changed over time, but, “since the beginning of the war on terror, American popular culture has been colored by the fear of possible terrorist attacks and the grim realization that people are not as safe and secure as they might have once thought” (Bishop 17), leading people to rely more heavily on a government that offers increased security in exchange for individual liberty through such measures as the PATRIOT Act. One of the primary methods of convincing citizens to give up their constitutional rights post-9/11 came through the controlled use of metaphor and keywords, such as “homeland,” “Ground Zero,” and “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The emphasis on the controlling linguistic nature of the state is reflected in the terms that Buffalo adopts to control its loosely knit, quasimilitary survivors—“Now, the people were no longer mere survivors, half-mad refugees, a pathetic, shit-flecked, traumatized herd, but the ‘American Phoenix’” (99). Spitz’s first camp is named “Happy Acres, and indeed everyone’s mood did brighten a bit on seeing that name on the gate next to the barbed wire and electric fencing” (99). By literally branding the recovery efforts (corporations can become “sponsors,” donating merchandise that might otherwise be confiscated), Buffalo turns the survivors back into organized consumers, and “it was almost as if the culture was picking up where it left off” (99). However, being a member of the American Phoenix means giving up a number of liberties, including the right to loot and even the most basic right of all: “Killing yourself in the interregnum was understandable. Killing yourself in the age of the American Phoenix was a rebuke to its principles” (251). By participating in the new state fantasy of the American Phoenix, the individual becomes subordinate to the group, allowing the group to chart the course of the future. It is ultimately this adherence to a national-fantasy narrative that leads to the doom of Manhattan in Zone One. The reconstruction efforts in Zone One have focused on the profoundly symbolic mission of recapturing Manhattan, but Buffalo is unable to create a new national narrative that does not contain the seeds of its own destruction. Their insistence on the reinstatement of the values of the time before Last Night causes them to misallocate resources on a plan that, while freighted with symbolic and narratological significance, was utterly impractical and indefensible. As Manhattan falls, Spitz realizes:

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He’d always wanted to live in New York but that city didn’t exist anymore. He didn’t know if the world was doomed or saved, but whatever the next thing was, it would not look like what came before. . . . Why they’d tried to fix this island in the first place, he did not see now. Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn’t ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before. (320)

The message of Whitehead’s novel, that the ashes of the old world are the worst possible foundation upon which to build a new one, takes on an eerie relevance as a new building now dominates the New York City skyline, a doppelganger heavy with symbolism—One World Trade Center, colloquially known as the Freedom Tower. The Freedom Tower was built next to the site of the former World Trade Center and is the tallest building in America, at a patriotic 1,776 feet tall. While many professionals say they find the idea of working in this new building unimaginable, with three million square feet of space and at least two restaurants, there is little doubt that a new generation of sweepers will make One World Trade Center their new daytime address before going home to Staten Island. WORKS CITED Bishop, Kyle. “Dead Man Still Walking.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 37, no. 1 (2009): 16–25. Print. Bromwich, David. “What 9/11 Makes Us Forget.” Huffington Post Politics. September 10, 2011. Web. May 28, 2014. Fassler, Joe. “Colson Whitehead on Zombies, ‘Zone One,’ and His Love of the VCR.” Atlantic. October 18, 2011. Web. May 28, 2014. Hiatt, Anna. “9/11 Memorial Museum Opens to Public in N.Y.” Washington Post. May 21, 2014. Web. May 28, 2014. McNally, David. “Zombies: Apocalypse or Rebellion?” Jacobin. October 23, 2013. Web. May 28, 2014. Nye, Joseph S. “Lessons Learned since 9/11: Narratives Matter.” Power and Policy. Harvard Kennedy School of Business. September 2, 2011. Web. May 28, 2014. Pease, Donald E. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnestota Press, 2009. Print. Rose, Jacqueline. States of Fantasy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Print. Saldívar, Ramón. “The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative.” Narrative 21, no. 1 (2013): 1–18. Stratton, Jon. “Zombie Trouble: Zombie Texts, Bare Life and Displaced People.” European Journal of Cultural Studies. 14, no. 3 (2011): 265–81. Print. Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Print. Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. New York: Random House, 2011. Print. Zombieland. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2010.

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NOTES 1. Gary, one of triplet brothers, the other two who died on Last Night, continues to speak for himself and his deceased brothers by using first-person plural. 2. For a more in-depth exploration, see Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission (2012).

FIVE A Eulogy of the Urban Superhero The Everyday Destruction of Space in the Superhero Film James N. Gilmore

The scarred cityscape has been a key aesthetic trope of American cinema since 9/11, particularly in the superhero film. The fear of the scarred cityscape has, simultaneously, become a key state of everyday life in America, stemming from an omnipresent dread that violence can interrupt and restructure our relation to space. There remains a dull, persistent fear that the scarred cityscape will again rear its head of twisted, burning steel. The superhero film, then, continues to replay a collective urban trauma, a cultural memory transformed into an uneasy spectacle. As we cross into the second “post-9/11” decade, films such as Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013) and The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012) continue to embrace the aesthetic of wreckage. They challenge the idea that we could take pleasure in such spectacularly unnerving imagery. Beyond 9/11, the steady persistence of scarred cityscapes as cultural events further extends this visual trope beyond September 11 and into an American everyday anxiety. The Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, for instance, was replayed ad nauseam on television news and social media sites. These images take control of social and news media, even if only for several hours, arresting the flow of the day and redirecting our attention to images of ruined architecture. The linear stream of pithy messages on Twitter and other forms of social media become a cascading wall of the same image ceaselessly retweeted, reblogged, and recirculated. They are more startling because they feel like stills from The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)—these images capture and lay bare the precar53

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ity of urban constructs. Although no skyscrapers topple to the ground, Rises’s aesthetic is predicated on the anxiety these images produce and the frames through which their “real-world” counterparts have been disseminated. More than a semantic emblem of 9/11, the scarred cityscape transcends the historical specificity of that morning and marks a post-9/ 11 American urban landscape and collective unconscious racked by a steady dread of violence. This chapter draws its title from Scott Bukatman’s essay “The Boys in the Hoods: A Song of the Urban Superhero,” which explores the phenomenology of the superhero’s movements through urban space. It is undoubtedly a “pre-9/11” piece of scholarship, one that revels in the tension between walkers and fliers, arguing at one point that “Superman is a skyscraper . . . a monument of the modern city, to be gawked at as part of the landscape” (197). This gawking—this gaze upward—is pleasurable and not terrifying. We revel in the stability of Superman, not the precarity of urban structures. Urban wreckage alters how we might feel the hero’s transcendental flights of fancy, while simultaneously expanding the affective possibilities of the superhero’s world. So why alter Bukatman’s title to include the substantially darker word eulogy? Clearly the urban superhero has not died—in 2012–2013 alone, The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers, Man of Steel, Thor: The Dark World (Alan Taylor, 2013), and The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb, 2012) all feature spectacular climaxes that heavily integrate urban spaces. The urban superhero is arguably doing better than ever in the industrial sense, performing at the top of Hollywood’s financial game the world over. But something has changed: the city is no longer a site to be saved but rather to be sacrificed; 9/11 imagery is no longer prevented—circumvented, in the years immediately following 9/11, at the last moment by a spider’s web or a man faster than a speeding bullet—it is permitted. Skyscrapers topple instead of being propped up; citizens run in terror instead of rejoicing at the hero’s last-minute arrival. Their looks to the sky are looks of terror, not awe. The genre’s relationship to 9/11 imagery just past the event’s tenth anniversary constitutes a new and far more complex cycle, one that acknowledges not just the historic actuality of 9/11 but the omnipresent fear of urban wreckage in everyday life post-9/11. The superhero, once the force that could save New York and its stand-ins from any disaster, is now largely powerless to preventing mass destruction (even if he can still beat the onslaught of villains and atomic bombs that threaten total annihilation). The urban superhero needs to be eulogized in that he can no longer perform his function: he can no longer save the city. His mythological import may no longer exist in this endlessly wrecked post-9/11 landscape. This chapter argues that the superhero film entered a new cycle of development after 9/11’s tenth anniversary—what I am calling the “postpost-9/11” moment. This cycle is principally defined by the incorporation

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of greater amounts of urban wreckage. As we move farther in linear time from 9/11, we are still stuck in a representational loop where 9/11 cannot be disavowed, only brought more to the fore. These representations are effectually acknowledgments of 9/11—Superman could not save the Twin Towers even if he existed. This post-post-9/11 cycle forces us to confront the city in new and deeply unsettling ways. While analyses of the superhero film have rather extensively explored the genre’s post-9/11 shift, this analysis usually culminates in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008). This chapter proceeds first with an exploration of how genre theory and everyday critique can lend a better sense to how the superhero film might be reimagined as cycles struggling with the spectacular imagery of historical trauma. This chapter will then pair this theory to the aesthetic representation of urban wreckage in these post-post-9/11 films. I am aware, writing this chapter in early 2014, that this cycle may be ongoing, or may shift readily in the months and years to come, and so these conclusions and analyses pay isolated attention to the genre in 2012–2013. Like Bukatman, I am in part interested in how the superhero film asks us to feel and experience urban space. Where he saw life and transcendence, I see something more tragic. I see, to borrow his terms, the awesome power of gravity that can only be felt by watching a skyscraper—that symbol of modernism’s great triumph over space—topple. Moreover, I grapple with the superhero genre as a series of cycles that are industrially, politically, and culturally motivated, much as we collectively deal with the cyclical inescapability of representations of urban trauma post-9/ 11. Where genre theory has done much to discursively account for the construction of such shifts and cycles, I argue that we can better understand the social importance of these images through Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier’s rhythmanalytical analyses of everyday life. Genre, in its relatively stable structures founded on a constant tension between repetition and difference, has strong affinities with the habitualization of the moments of our everyday lives. Indeed, everyday routine seems a fundamental mirror to the repetitions of genre. Ben Highmore, in discussing Georg Simmel’s notion of “sociological aesthetics,” suggests finding artworks that “find productively expressive forms for bringing everyday social experiences, often relegated to the background, into the foreground. . . . It would mean, in other words, that we treat artworks as forms of social and cultural research that are particularly suited to the description of experience” (307). The superhero film operates, then, as a site of our experience of and confrontation with post-9/11 urban imagery. Caught between the linear progression of time and the cyclical motions of lived experience, genre has the capacity to help structure and understand our relationship to temporalities. I argue not that the superhero film’s repetition of destruction has numbed us but instead helped us make sense of the way urban wreckage—or the dread of urban wreckage—

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pervades an everyday way of being in the world. As Lauren Berlant suggests, “aesthetics is not the only place where we rehabituate our sensorium by taking in new material and becoming more refined in relation to it. But it provides metrics for understanding how we pace and space our encounters with things, how we manage the closeness of the world” (12). The superhero film’s structural stability provides ways to deal with the disruption of urban trauma, but by incorporating increased representations of that trauma, its relationship to the everyday rhythms of the “post-9/11 world” need to be continually reexamined. In Film/Genre, Rick Altman turns away from his widely applied concept of the semantic/syntactic system of analyzing genre—relating the “building blocks” of content to structures—toward a discursive methodology that considers its relationship to the industries, cultures, and nations that produce it and how that production is contingent and varied for the consumers that approach the genre. Genres, in this view, facilitate “the integration of diverse factions into a single unified social fabric” (195). The social and political dimensions of genre are key and have been taken up in many of the field’s most pioneering studies. The task becomes to pay attention to how genres unify competing factions and how they address differently grouped users at certain moments in their history. Similarly, genre and national identity interlock on mutually reinforcing levels. This is not to say, “the superhero film reflects an American identity,” but rather our continued experience of it becomes part of how we navigate some part of our identity and relationship to the cultural landscapes surrounding the sites of media genres. Somewhat akin to Altman’s trajectory, Leger Grindon suggests attending to “the social problems animating the characteristic dramatic conflicts of a genre” (42). Grindon defines a cycle as “a series of genre films produced during a limited period of time and linked by a dominant trend in their use of the genre’s conventions” (43), and as Altman finds in his discursive analysis, this cyclical nature is ongoing and often ceaseless. While others such as Derek Johnson are rightfully researching the genre’s industrial history in great detail, my task is rather to engage the experiential significance of the scarred cityscape. I share Grindon’s enthusiasm for “a division of genre history into cycles and clusters [that] can yield fresh insight into historical developments and key turning points for conventions” (51)—a demarcation even better served for a genre built on franchises and sequels. Superhero studies have indeed been served well by cyclical analysis. Matthew J. Costello, in his analysis of Marvel comics in the Cold War, argues that the genre is an open process that constantly changing in accordance with consumers’ changing political and cultural contexts. While Costello’s analysis at times relies on overly neat chronological demarcation of periods, avatars, and cultural symbols, his work is generative for considering how—and if—the superhero’s meaning and interaction with cultural imagery maintains the same thrust over time or

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shifts with culture, industry, and politics. As such, the increased presence of urban wreckage in the superhero’s cinematic frames constitutes a new cycle tied to multiple ongoing processes, such as traumatic residues of 9/ 11, and the possibilities of spectacular imagery as both escape and confrontation. This idea of process has been central to contemporary genre theory, which has overwhelmingly explored this cyclical model as opposed to a teleological model of a genre’s history. For Steve Neale, the “process” of a genre occurs at three levels: “the level of expectation, the level of the generic corpus, and the level of the ‘rules’ and ‘norms’ that govern both” (1990, 171). Discussing a genre in terms of its sociocultural environment returns routinely—and problematically—to the “implication that these issues remain the same, and the production of the genres that deal with them is smoothly continuous” (2000, 224). It is obvious to say genres evolve over time, and so the task becomes identifying where and asking why. The shifting representation of urban space in the superhero film cracks the ground of the genre’s supposed stability, ushering new ways of feeling and being with these films; their generic pleasure is utterly complicated, confronting the cultural anxiety surrounding them. We need, then, to better understand this central issue of repetition and difference, especially as they relate to a political aesthetic of traumatic imagery. The everyday lived experience of genre is something crucially unaccounted for in theorizing its importance. The superhero film, as a Hollywood output released at particular times of the year—often between the months of May and August—has become part of the rhythm and habit of our movie-going experience. The continued financial success of the genre speaks, if anything, to the desire to have this genre remain part of our living experience of twenty-first century American cinema. The rhythmanalytical project of Lefebvre and Régulier provides an important intersection for understanding this ongoing and increasingly complex relationship to the spectacle of urban wreckage in the superhero film. They argue, “To study everyday life is to examine how and why social time is itself a social product. Like any other product . . . time can be divided into usage and exchange. It has a use-value and an exchange-value; it is both lived and exchanged” (6). To experience cinema is to trade capital for time, for a period of watching, such that the use value of the post-post-9/ 11 superhero film must be understand in relation to time. Lefebvre and Régulier see time as both cyclical and linear. Cyclical movements, “from the beats of the heart, to the movements of the eye, to the alternation of the day and night,” (7) are much like genre itself, with its reliable mixture of sameness and difference—its deployment of recognizable icons and structures. We experience its rhythms with the routinization we ascribe to everyday life. Much as we believe we will depart at a certain time for work in order to arrive on time, so too do we believe the superhero will save the city. Genre’s rhythms are processes of ordering,

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where any rupturing moments of deviation force us to rethink the genre, the routine, the everyday. The superhero film, then, treats urban wreckage—or at the very least, the fear or anticipation of it—as part of our everyday, not as sequences of shock but as sequences that are intimately familiar and lived. Much as we expect the city to come under siege at the appropriate climactic moment, so too do we live with the throbbing sense that in post-9/11 society another billowing cloud of smoke could occur anywhere at any time. Linear time, opposingly, “designates any series of identical occurrences separated by small intervals of time” (Lefebvre and Régulier 7). The superhero genre’s reliance on franchises certainly marks it as both cyclical and linear—the ascription of numbers or subtitles marks each text as different and as successive (i.e., Iron Man 2 and Iron Man 3). Linear time also suggests a progression, a slow march away from a past. In the post-post-9/11 superhero film, cyclical and linear time collide: we collectively move away from the image event of 9/11 in that I am now writing in the calendar year 2014, yet the image still hopelessly replays—even amplifies—in the genre’s cyclical rhythms. The representation of urban wreckage in Man of Steel generated discourse about the aesthetics of destruction and its relationship to 9/11 imagery, with many suggesting the film feels utterly blasé and dismissive about its carnage. Near film’s end, Superman and Lois Lane stand in a burning arena of smoldering computer-generated buildings—rather than discuss the horrific implications of this space, they kiss. The question, if one is to charge the filmmakers with an ethical imperative, is whether or not they should consider the affective gravity of these images. There is a “Post-9/11 Question” surrounding the film’s release neatly summarized in the headline of a Vulture article published on its opening weekend: “Is It Possible to Make a Hollywood Blockbuster without Evoking 9/11?” Kyle Buchanan calls the falling towers, omnipresent ash, and “great plumes of smoke” that pervade the film’s final act “the sort of disastrous detail added to these kinds of movies for verisimilitude.” The problem with this evocation, as Buchanan and others point out, is the lack of acknowledgment that anyone might have died in the wreckage—removing the loss of life transforms this into a “pure” spectacle. The “Falling Man” of 9/11 is nowhere to be found. This is not unique to Man of Steel. In The Avengers, large masses of people run from falling debris, take shelter in buildings, and look on with terrified faces. Their security is a key element of the action, but even though people are a part of this action, there is never a sense that they might die. The wreckage here is architectural, not biological. Justin Chang similarly charges, “Whether casually evocative or deliberately allusive, such imagery cannot help but bear the psychic residue of our greatest national catastrophe,” and Peter Debruge cynically asserts, “Studios have evidently lifted the sensitivity ban.” Yet audiences still consume these films voraciously. This confrontation with destruction, however unpleasant it may feel to view, has a particular cul-

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tural resonance that transcends the industry’s drive toward the spectacular. How then might these films nuance the relationship between genre, the everyday, and—most importantly—history and the past? Lefebvre suggests, “The concept of the everyday illuminates the past. Everyday life has always existed, even if in ways vastly different from our own. . . . In the study of the everyday we discover the great problem of repetition, one of the most difficult problems facing us” (1987, 10). He develops his critiques of everyday life out of modernism, where “the everyday imposes its monotony” (10), and as such, we may need to rethink and specify how this monotony operates in post-9/11 culture. As to cinema, he suggests, “The cinema and television divert the everyday by at times offering up to it its own spectacle, or sometimes the spectacle of the distinctly noneveryday, violence, death, catastrophe . . . those who we are led to believe defy everydayness” (1987, 11). But catastrophe—or the rhetoric of fear that imposes the constant possibility of catastrophe—has become part of our everyday, such that the superhero genre now constructs instead of avoids the pervasiveness of this imagery to a collective cultural unconscious. If it is impossible to make a superhero movie without evoking 9/11, that may only signal the continued place it occupies in our sense of cyclical time. The post-post-9/11 shift confronts us with questions of temporality, with how genre’s negotiation of cyclical and linear time exists in relation to the cultures and politics of its production and consumption against the apparent timelessness of the superhero. If the city has now been reimagined as a site that has not been—and cannot be—saved, then this destabilizes the ahistorical lack of consciousness the superhero genre is often accused of. This cycle of films speak to our continued problematic of living between cyclical and linear time in the perpetual trauma of the post-9/11 world. We move forward, but the scarred cityscape haunts us. In moments of urban wreckage—be they the establishing shots of The Dark Knight Rises or a street explosion in Boston—our minds conjure the traumatic scars of the twenty-first-century city. The post-post-9/11 cycle rejects the superhero as an urban protector and positions him instead as a demythologized tool for the continual confrontation with and processing of urban trauma—the superhero explicates the cycles of everyday dread in post-9/11 society. Urban wreckage in these films occurs at two contrasting aesthetic levels: from the skyline and from the ground. Both the establishing shot and the tracking shot are deployed for contrasting aims: to show the decimation of the city in the former and to show the bodily effect in the latter. Both of these replay elements of 9/11 imagery: the footage of the burning World Trade Centers in the former and the images of fleeing pedestrians in the latter. The city effectively becomes a battleground not only for its diegetic citizens but also for our collision with these appropriated historical images.

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For example, The Dark Knight Rises shifts the experience of the establishing shot throughout, gradually stripping any pleasures associated with viewing the city from above. The representation of a city under siege in the second half of The Dark Knight Rises reflexively considers this pleasure through the bombing of another site of pleasure—a football stadium. The simultaneous bombing of the football field and the city at large show the two images as intrinsically interrelated, as replications on varying scales. The spectacle of the football game is converted into a site of terror, just as smoke and bombs similarly erupt across Gotham and imbue the aerial shot with a look of horror. Shots of urban wreckage are, I argue, anxiety laden. They depend on a profoundly historical anxiety grounded in the cyclical rhythms of everyday time. Urban wreckage functions on both a semantic and syntactic level. The expectation for disaster is built into the marketing paratexts for these post-post-9/11 films. In the poster for The Avengers, the characters are collected in the foreground, staring in various directions while they stand amid burning rubble. Behind them, large clusters of debris and ash fall, a fireball explodes out of a building on the right side of the frame, a plane falls from the sky in the center of the frame, and the Chrysler building is slightly right of center. The event of urban disaster is sold alongside the film, such that a ticket to The Avengers will in part entail watching the destruction of New York City. Similarly, the first poster for The Dark Knight Rises features the iconic “Bat Symbol” outlined by crumbling skyscrapers; the second poster features the same motif, but the symbol is now outlined in fire with greater amounts of debris falling from the buildings, such that the urban wreckage gets more accentuated in the marketing campaign closer to the film’s release. If part of sustaining a genre is creating expectations through habitualization—or if paratexts work to condition spectator groups for what the film might contain— then these posters foreground urban wreckage as a key semantic element of this cycle. In The Avengers, Man of Steel, and The Dark Knight Rises, the city becomes something of a war zone. The narrow channels of city streets and the vertical rise of skyscrapers barricade and contain the movement through space. The major repetition of these action sequences—which are all remarkably sustained, lasting for the bulk of each film’s third act—are a constant oscillation between the pleasurable spectacle and the terrorism of spectacle. At the climactic moment of The Dark Knight Rises, for instance, Batman attempts to fly a nuclear bomb out of the city, but in order to do so, he must blast through a skyscraper. The sight of the flames sparks a cry of fear from onlooking spectators before they realize Batman is behind the controlled blast—the cries of fear turn to cheers of joy. Batman reinstates the spectacle, rescues it from its terror, much like the Avengers avert the “real” crisis—an atomic bomb that would wipe out all of New York City—while simultaneously vanquishing an alien invasion.

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In the cycle of Marvel films, the new “Phase 2” of post-Avengers films— such as Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Joe and Anthony Russo, 2014) and television’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC, 2013–present)—treat this battle as Marvel’s 9/11. Characters across these texts utter variations of the line “Everything changed after New York.” This Battle of New York shifts 9/11 into a victory for the superheroes, while nevertheless weaving the historical fabric of 9/11’s epoch-defining wreckage into the narrative fabric of these franchises. I have used the terms “confrontation” or “collision” throughout this chapter, and this comes largely from my contention that there is something about these images that are almost dialectic, in Walter Benjamin’s famous conception of the phrase. They are moments where past imagery intrudes on the present, that fundamentally alarm us and bring to the fore something that may have been lurking unconsciously. If the fear of urban wreckage is part of everyday life, then these spectacular representations play on that fear—a fear tied fundamentally to the precise moment of 9/11. Adam Lowenstein’s concept of “shocking representation” as a way to understand how genre film communicates significant historical trauma is useful here. While Lowenstein talks about the relationship between national identity and the horror film, his arguments are equally helpful for the superhero film. The allegorical moment, for Lowenstein, is “a shocking collision of film, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical time are disrupted, confronted, and intertwined” (2), where representation can powerfully convey both trauma and history. Lowenstein ties cinema to Benjamin’s dialectic image: “The realm of the image, with its connotations of ruin, fragmentation, and death, is thus also, for Benjamin, the realm of history’s representation” (13). Culturally aware spectators are thus confronted with the contingencies of their historical consciousness. While he thinks largely in terms of the bodily traumas of the horror genre, I see appropriate analogies to the architectural and spatial traumas lingering in the spectacle of the superhero film. The superhero film then constructs, in the intimately and digitally constructed images of scarred cityscapes, confrontations with our sense of how our national identity and urban trauma are interrelated in the post-post-9/11 world. This is to suggest that, ultimately, what I have insisted on calling post-post-9/11 is actually a purposeful misnomer and that, at least from the vantage point of 2014, we are still inextricably unable to divorce our experience of scarred cityscapes from the historical images they summon. The spectacle becomes not a sign of our inundation to consumer culture, as Guy Debord might famously have it, but a space to summon the very spectacle of twenty-first-century history. The mediated spectacle of the past erupts into the mediated spectacle of the present.

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Man of Steel, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Avengers rely on images of urban wreckage to exponentially higher degrees than their predecessors to summon dread, provoke deep feelings of unease and anxiety, and provide a dialectical flash of history. The wreckage of history, to borrow from Walter Benjamin, is rendered as urban wreckage. They break the cycle of the genre in that they show the superhero’s ineffectiveness as a mythological protector of a broadly defined “America,” but they remain invested in the ever-accumulating cycle of urban disaster that transcends 9/11 and continues to occur with stark regularity; the fear of these events remains to some degree omnipresent. The writing of disaster, in Maurice Blanchot’s terms, is never written but is forever ongoing. Tragedies enveloped within tragedies become part of our lived everyday. The rhythmic experience of genre has become attuned to everyday tragedy, such that these films signal not a numbing to the gravity of this wreckage but a frighteningly weighty reminder of its place in our collective history. At the end of March 2014, four men were arrested for a BASE Jumping stunt from One World Trade Center that occurred in September 2013. Three of the men parachuted from the top of the structure and recorded the stunt via helmet cameras; the video was subsequently posted to YouTube and widely disseminated (see further: Draznin). Aside from how One World Trade Center can be read as a symbolic rebirth of urban space, operating as both a memorial to loss and a testament to the materiality of buildings—their ability to be rebuilt and repaired—this video repurposes the famous 9/11 image of Falling Man. Instead of looking at Falling Man, this video asks us to embody the sense of falling, only to parachute to safety. It summons and subverts the traumatic imagery in much the same strategy of the superhero genre—engaging 9/11 imagery without considering its bodily toll. As we move further in linear time away from the image event, the cyclical accumulation of urban wreckage in popular media refuses to relent. Beyond Hollywood blockbusters, amateur videos like those of the BASE Jumpers suggests the ability for our relationship to urban space to, at any moment, summon up deeply complex connections to the moment of 9/11. Historical trauma is not so easily solved by linear time. Bound in cyclical time typified and enhanced through generic repetition, we revisit the images of historical disasters perhaps in part because we are still searching for the appropriate catharsis. These appropriations—be they political or spectacular—endow a historical consciousness to the superhero genre and to the everyday. Walter Benjamin famously read the Angel of History as perceiving “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (255). These media summon the fleeting moments of the dialectic image, where the “past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at instant” (255). September 11 remains the literal and proverbial historical wreckage of contemporary America. The post-post-9/11 superhero films that scarred

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skylines may haunt us for years to come. But we should welcome this haunting. The scarred and wrecked establishing shot ensures history does not slip away from our mediated representations of space. WORKS CITED Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. New ed. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Buchanan, Kyle. “Is It Possible to Make a Hollywood Blockbuster without Evoking 9/ 11?” Vulture, June 13, 2013. http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/hollywoodblockbusters-cant-stop-evoking-911.html. Accessed April 4, 2014. Bukatman, Scott. “The Boys in the Hood: A Song of the Urban Superhero.” In Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, 184–223. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Chang, Justin, and Peter Debruge. “Does ‘Man of Steel’ Exploit Disasters like 9/11?” Variety. June 17, 2013. http://variety.com/2013/film/news/does-man-of-steel-exploitdisasters-like-911-1200497860/. Accessed April 4, 2014. Costello, Matthew J. Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America. New York: Continuum, 2009. Draznin, Haley. “Four Men Arrested in One World Trade Center Jump Stunt.” CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/25/justice/one-world-trade-center-jump-stunt/. Accessed April 20, 2014. Grindon, Leger. “Cycles and Clusters: The Shape of Film Genre History.” In Film Genre Reader IV, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 42–59. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Highmore, Ben. “Homework: Routine, Social Aesthetics and the Ambiguity of Everyday Life.” Cultural Studies 18, no. 2–3 (2004): 306–27. Johnson, Derek. “Cinematic Destiny: Marvel Studios and the Trade Stories of Industrial Convergence.” Cinema Journal, 52, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 1–24. Lefebvre, Henri. “The Everyday and Everydayness.” Translated by Christine Levich, et al. Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 5–13. Lefebvre, Henri, and Catherine Régulier. “The Rhythmanalytical Project.” Rethinking Marxism 11, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 5–13. Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. “Questions of Genre.” In Film Genre Reader III, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 160–84. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

II

Perception, Ideology, and Community

SIX Paucity of Imagination Stereotypes, Public Debates, and the Limits of Ideology in Amy Waldman’s The Submission Amir Khadem

While the years after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, did not lead to a dearth of literary production in response to the catastrophe, many of these responses eschew, and in other cases reinforce, the political infirmities that surfaced in American public life as a result of the attacks. Many of these works do not engage in a mutual or constructive understanding of the social gap—be it ethnic, racial, or religious—that marked the era; in some cases, a superficial attempt to critique the Other, or a perfunctory portrait of seemingly impenetrable strangers, either terrorists or those supporting them, have contributed to widening the gap. As the two towers fell and the American society became painfully aware of its limited exceptionalism, the rants of “war on terror” immediately took up the task of stitching up the ruptured ideology and even made it more resolute than before; several literary productions, wittingly or unwittingly, supported this new blatant rise of American ideology. The Other, for instance, is either not acknowledged as himself and reduced to a variation of a familiar character, or worse, his unfamiliarity is emboldened to the extent that it becomes his naturally acceptable feature; such an approach is easily observable in works like John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) or Martin Amis’s short story The Last Days of Muhammad Atta (2006). It is also visible, but in a more low-key manner, in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), whose depiction of the terrorist character is criticized for being depthless, unintelligible, and inauthentic. 1 67

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But a more subtle, and more widespread, political problem with many post-9/11 novels is their continual tendency to reduce the public effects of the terrorist event to private affairs, creating allegorical narratives that only indirectly illustrate the macro-scale issues through the micro-level stories of strained families, dejected couples, and lovelorn individuals or using the horrific event as a springboard for a deeply personal narrative that has very little to do with the large-scale politics of counterterrorism. As Richard Gray notes in his evaluation of a handful of post-9/11 American novels published before 2008, in many of them “cataclysmic public events are measured purely and simply in terms of their impact on the emotional entanglements of their protagonists” (134). A few works, like Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which appeared in the margins of American literature and crawled its way into popular attention, indeed made thoughtful contributions to the political debates on Islamic terrorism; however, it would take more than a few years for many American novelists to come to terms with the post-9/11 condition, dilute the hyperbolized mixture of panic and patriotism, and make conscious efforts to dissect the country’s social life in their fiction. Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) is among the first politically engaging post-9/11 American novels that not only avoid the faulty head-on approach in the depiction of the Muslim terrorists but also counter the general reduction of public life to private affairs by creating a narrative of the American moral panic in the encounter with its Muslim minority. One of the most significant themes of Waldman’s novel, as I will detail in the following pages, is the problem of relating personal experiences of loss, threat, or panic to the public sphere. The novel begins with the final meeting of a committee, gathered to pick the winning submission for a memorial construction at Ground Zero. The anonymous winning design, after long debates, is a garden, which then turns out to be the work of a young American architect named Mohammad Khan. The committee’s session, thus far filled with abstract arguments about the artistic qualities of different contending submissions, suddenly transforms into chaos. The meeting is adjourned in turmoil, when its president, Paul Rubin, decides that he needs more time to see how a Muslim’s winning of the contest can be handled. The decision, which has not yet become final, leaks out to a reporter who decides to make her career out of it. The rest of the novel presents the architect’s attempts to claim his win, the angry patriots all over the country campaigning against him, and the exhausted members of the submission committee trying to both exonerate themselves and defend the integrity of their decision. The novel’s polyphony, a laborious product of cataloguing almost every political voice, from the far-right xenophobes to stark defenders of tolerance, is visible in numerous fictional simulations of newspaper reports, radio and television shows, op-ed pieces, and press conferences. This polyphonic structure enables the narrative to ex-

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pose the limits of current political discourses in dealing with the Muslim community. In the course of this chapter, I will analyze The Submission’s engagement with the post-9/11 rise of Islamophobia, its attitude toward American exceptionalism, and its examination of the complicated link between personal identities and public roles for both the grieving Americans and the marginalized citizens like Mohammad Khan, who find their ordinary lives under extraordinary pressures. Mohammad Khan first appears in the novel as a passenger selected in the Los Angeles airport to be checked thoroughly and undergo a security investigation before his flight to New York City. There, in his exasperated attempts to prove to the security agents he is an architect, he pulls out some of his designs and construction plans, creating a mild irony when the agents “shrugged and examined the designs with suspicion, as if he were planning to bomb a building that exists only in his imagination” (27). Khan’s condition is foreshadowed as an individual tangled in a web of tragicomic accusations, most of which seem so absurd that a logical counterargument to them is almost impossible. On the same page, he recalls that in the immediate days after the attacks, when the accusations against Muslims seemed irrefutable, he realized that, in his daily conduct, “the difference wasn’t in how he was being treated but in how he was behaving. . . . He didn’t like this new, more cautious avatar, whose efforts at accommodation hinted at some feeling of guilt, yet he couldn’t quite shake him” (27). Mo, as he is called by his friends and acquaintances, has to struggle not only with the outside forces of dogmatism and hatred but also with the self-representation that he uncomfortably creates. Perhaps the most illuminating part of the narrative regarding the dichotomy of individual identity and public appearance is Mo’s long personal struggle with having or not having a beard. A conspicuously stereotypical mark of Muslim men becomes the incarnation of his increasingly arduous conflict, after Mo finds out that he has won the award, as a result of its news leaking out in the press, and starts claiming it preemptively. He realizes that his short beard, which he had started to grow a few months before, turns into a personal manifestation of his adamancy, and he refuses to shave it off. The novel makes it quite clear that Mo has almost no religious beliefs, which later works against his possible solidarity with Muslim communities; thus, his beard was originally an attestation of his individuality and not a sign of conformity to religious practices. Months before the memorial submission, in a trip he had made to Afghanistan as a project for his architecture company to enter a contest for designing the new building for the American embassy in Kabul, Mo, for the first time, sensed a segregation between himself and other American architects, and after his return to New York, he grew the beard “merely to assert his right to wear a beard, to play with the assumptions about his religiosity it might create” (128). But the personal

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assertion becomes a public message, and Mo, refusing to blend into the Muslim ethnic community as a refuge from the harsh Islamophobic attacks, and simultaneously defending his rights as an artist and a citizen, discovers that his own facial hair does not quite belong to him. 2 The power of stereotype subdues his physical appearance to the extent that either choices of shaving or keeping the beard become a politically encumbered decision. He wanted to play with the assumptions of religiosity, but those assumptions, in effect, took him as pawn in their game. A group called the Muslim American Coordinating Council—MACC, note the wordplay with Mac, as in McDonalds, and also the delicate reference to Mecca—decides to help Mo in his pursuits to defend his design. The complicating relations between the maverick artist and MACC, mostly due to the fact the former is trying to ignore Islamophobia while the latter is basically formed as a coalition against it, contributes to further enrichment of the narrative’s complex network of irreconcilable stereotypes and agendas. The group, as is apparent in the word play in its name, tries to prove that one can be deeply American and sternly Muslim at the same time; for this purpose, Mo’s case is an invaluable opportunity. Khan’s refusal to help with their promotional plans leads to a heated discussion between him and his lawyer, commissioned for him by MACC, which again touches upon the issue of beard. Laila, the lawyer, asks bluntly, “Your beard—you started growing it when you were overseas?” to which Mo responds positively. “And then worked on your design for, what, a few weeks when you came back? . . . And so by the time you sent off your submission your beard must have been pretty well grown in, like it is now. . . . And the photograph you submitted with your entry—beard?” “No beard,” Mo responds only to hear her reply, “It makes me sad. . . . Next you’ll shave for them” (198–99). This is, in fact, what he does near the end of the novel. After the turmoil over the design reaches an intolerable level, the New York governor decides to hold a public hearing before finalizing the committee’s decision. In the morning of the hearing, Mo, now having a rare chance to defend his right, contemplates deeply what the beard of a non-believing Muslim could signify: “If he shaved, would he be losing the argument or ending it? Was he betraying his religion? No, but it would look that way. Was he betraying himself?” (240). The word “betray,” I suggest, while most probably used to denote being disloyal, can also be read in the sense of divulging or displaying, which implies that what frightens Mo is not only an inevitable perfidy to his community but also an unwarranted self-exposition that can end up destroying his current self-representation for even himself. The beard, in other words, is a social signifier, whose signified is constantly evading Mo to the extent that he completely loses sovereignty over its meaning. But this loss is not because the beard’s meaning is inherently evasive. It is the result of the limits of recognition, leaving indelible traces on the cognitive abilities of the American public.

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All the ideologically loaded debates over the collective identity of Muslim communities, their rights, or their threats that color a considerable portion of the novel are shown to be inadequate in expressing the personal entanglement of a citizen, whose body becomes an arena of public dispute. Mo is in a personal quest to find the meaning of what segregates him from a society to which he always believed, until the day of the terrorist attacks, he belonged. His attempts are thwarted not just by the constant raids of Islamophobic attacks and denunciations but also by many American Muslims, who see the whole dispute as another process of discrimination and believe Mo to be an instigator of further hostility. “I hope you are satisfied,” a Muslim man addresses him in a MACC dinner, “with what you’ve unleashed, with the position you’ve put us in. Before you came along, it would have been shocking, unacceptable to refer to us as the enemy. Now it’s no big deal.” And the man finishes his assailing remark by saying, “You’ve made your point. You won. You can withdraw now” (220). The irony of the beard extends furthermore with the outraged man shifting the reality of the competition from designing the memorial to defaming Muslims. The wordplay of the novel’s title—“submission” is a verbatim translation of “Islam”—gains added significance here: a Muslim faces castigation because he submits to a cause for sequestering the Muslim community from the nation. The ironic shifts of meaning are mirrored on the other side of the story, when Rubin, the committee’s president, tries in vain to find a clue in the bylaws of the contest for the unanticipated case of Khan. He finds the only way to lawfully reject his design is to “pronounce Khan unsuitable” and scrupulously searches the term “unsuitable” in the dictionary. “‘Not appropriate.’ He looked up ‘appropriate’: ‘Suitable for a particular person, condition, occasion, or place; fitting.’ He looked up ‘fitting’: ‘Being in keeping with a situation; appropriate’” (56). The semantic loop Rubin finds himself ensnared in is another display of the limited scope of recognition, the limitation that is also apparent in interpreting Khan’s facial hair as an obvious sign of his unsuitability, while he is already believed to be unsuitable with or without the beard, meaning that even his act of shaving becomes, as a group of activists in the novel call it, a case of taqiya—a strategic lie practiced by Muslim minorities, in fact only Shias, in the face of imminent danger in order to hide their faith and save their lives (130). 3 Both Rubin’s ad infinitum deference of signifiers and Khan’s indecision about his beard pertain to what David Tyrer calls “the imaginative paucity of the language that dominates public discussions about Muslims” (106), which explains the condition that informs not only stereotypes but also most of the attempts against the stereotyping of Muslim identity in modern Western societies. One of the most recurring issues in scholarly debates about Islamophobia is that it is quite hard to define it in terms of racism because, strictly speaking, Islam does not constitute any race or ethnicity; while

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many acts of public hatred against Muslims exhibit obvious signs of racial politics, the lack of a proper label for these activities has made them difficult to denounce. Race, as the argument goes, is an involuntary condition, as opposed to religion, which is a creed open to human volitions; one can opt out of it if one desires. While in the West, historically, there have been cases that racial distinctions were extended to practitioners of a religion—for example, Sikhs and Jews—Islam is viewed as an exception. In this sense, as several studies have shown, values such as freedom of speech and the right to criticize any belief system are summoned as excuses for not extending any legal anti-discriminatory measures for Muslims in Western countries. 4 There are, of course, many problems with this argument. “Binary distinctions between race and religion particularly flounder,” Nasar Meer notes in his study of British Islamophobia, “when we recognize that many British Muslims report a higher level of discrimination and abuse when they appear ‘conspicuously Muslim’ than when they do not” (“Politics of Voluntary” 72). But apart from the fact that even with religiosity, it is not faith but the social appearance that intrigues acts of hatred, the dichotomy of voluntary religion versus involuntary race (or ethnicity) has a far more detrimental consequence. Analyzing a statement by a Conservative British MP, Meer explains the inevitable result of the race/religion binarism: Suppose, first, that a Jewish person could “pass” for being non-Jewish; they should then, according to [MP] Toynbee’s logic, take up this position in circumstances in which they might be subject to discrimination on the grounds of their real or perceived “Jewishness” so that they are (a) less offensive to others and (b) less offended by others. That is, if we argue that people’s “difference” is less deserving of protection if it is in anyway “changeable,” then we are advocating that those subject to discrimination or hostility should choose, where possible, to change their identity in order to avoid discrimination. (“Politics of Voluntary” 76–77)

Voluntary difference, from the perspective of Islamophobia’s defenders, creates enough grounds for acquittal from charges of racism, but it completely ignores that actions against such differences lead to a pragmatic normalization within the society. I noted in the novel how the ideological framework imposed a normalizing force against any attempts at singularity and, indeed, retained a blind opposition against it. The nonconformist artist has the ability to opt out of his Islamic identity, but doing so requires forsaking a considerable portion of his personality, including his name, not to mention his appearance. Some scholars, facing the problematic dichotomy of race/religion, have tried to extend the discourse of ethnic and racial minorities to include practitioners of Islam. Bassam Tibi, for instance, argues for “ethnicization” of Islam within the modern Europe (127). In a slightly different

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approach, Meer suggests considering Muslim identity as a “quasi-ethnic sociological formation” (“Politics of Voluntary” 66). Tyrer, however, believes that simply expanding the present categories does not solve this intricate problem. He proposes that “when Muslims are constructed as lacking proper raciality (as they are through the rejection of Islamophobia’s racism), this cannot be read as an absence of racism, but rather as a condition of its operation” (35). In this sense, the politics of discrimination against Muslims in the West has a double-layered structure, arising not in spite of the Muslims’ lack of proper raciality but in fact because of it: [In] social settings in which raciality is conflated with proper subjecthood for the racially and ethnically marked, on the one hand those who apparently lack raciality present a political problem (how can they be constituted as a bounded population) and on the other hand they can be constructed as somehow being incomplete subjects. . . . Within this logic, Muslims are thus simultaneously a lack or an incompleteness, and yet they are also an excess that has somehow exceeded their taming and drawing forth as members of a racial population. (36)

To see how such an enigmatic logic actualizes in practice, one can note, as Tyrer explicates, how limited the vocabulary for Muslim political identities is in Europe and North America. “Within the current configuration of debates,” he writes, “it seems almost impossible to speak of Muslims as, say, environmentalists, democrats, progressives, conservatives, socialists, pacifists, welfare activists, [or] LGBT campaigners” (106). Using the real example of Asmaa Abdol-Hamid, a Danish hijab-wearing socialist campaigning for an election in 2007, who faced attempts to be removed from candidacy because her democratic political views were perceived irreconcilable with being a “pure religious subject,” Tyrer clarifies how the idea of Muslim identity is marked as both too inflexible to accommodate any secular ideology and too evanescent to constitute a proper race or ethnicity (107). The observant Muslims are assumed to belong to an antidemocratic religious creed, while whoever among them partakes in nonreligious democratic actions is dismissed as deceitful or, like the case of Abdol-Hamid, “in need of ‘psychiatric treatment’” (Tyrer 106). As a further complication, one must be reminded that, while in terms of religious creed, what makes an observant person is the very private matter of faith; in the public sphere it can only be measured in the codified forms of practices and appearances, like hijab for women and beard for men. The irresolvable enigma of Mohammad Khan’s beard is, thus, another example of this logical contortion. The public outrage over Mo’s designed garden escalates after an art critic in the New York Times compares its architectural features to the classical aspects of Islamic gardens and, asserting the direct influence of Islamic architecture in Khan’s design, concludes, “Some might say the

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designer is mocking us, or playing with his religious heritage. Yet could he be trying to say something larger about the relationship between Islam and the West?” (129). That question, suffused with the tranquil civility and detachment of art criticism, gets lost in the tumult of subsequent events, when a hotheaded television pundit takes the article and extends its argument to absurdity: “He’s made a tomb, a graveyard, for them [the terrorists], not the victims. He would know that the Arabic word for tomb and garden are the same” (130). Needless to say, the assertion about Arabic is simply wrong, as the two words are not synonymous. 5 But apart from the falsity of the accusation, what enters the public debate at this point is the individual purpose of the artist behind his creation; the most intimate matter to divine, even for the artist himself. An article in the New Yorker, with the usual urbane tone of the magazine, ponders whether people “should judge him only by his design” and continues that “this is where matters get tricky. In venturing into public spaces, the private imagination contracts to serve the nation and should necessarily abandon its own ideologies and beliefs. This memorial is not an exercise in self-expression” (139). The article does not, of course, bother to answer why it is taken for granted that the artist, as an individual allegedly belonging to a community, has his own ideology but “the nation” can afford being represented above any ideology. Claire Burwell, the widow of a 9/11 victim, embodies the other side of the contorted demand to forsake personal ideology for the greater national one. The novel begins with Claire passionately defending the—then, anonymous—garden in the committee, and after finding out about the designer’s name, fighting for his right to win (20). But as the story progresses, she starts to hesitate and by the end completely loses her conviction in the designer and his design. What gradually afflicts her mind is, on the one hand, the impossibility of her demand, along with many others, to access the private goals behind the submitted artwork and, on the other hand, the inconsistency in her own attempts to sustain her public opinion based on her personal position: Claire is assigned a place in the committee not for any professional reason but only because of her personal loss. Her official role is to voice the bereaved families, but her initial insistence on the design separates her from most of them and, later, divides her own mind. Claire’s loss is her north star, too, as she constantly refers to her late husband to justify her opinions, claiming that what she says is what he would have wanted. “He would be appalled if he were alive,” she says in response to the adamantine position of those committee members who are against Khan and hears one respond, “But your husband’s not alive, Claire, and that’s why we’re here” (23). For Claire, at least initially, exhibiting tolerance is of primal importance. She constantly refers to the American exceptionalist ideology in order to defend Mo’s design, but through the narrative’s progress, the same ideological argument comes, paradoxically, in the service of the

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American intolerance for anything Islamic. In one of her debates with the other committee members, she argues that “it will send a message, a good message, that in America, it doesn’t matter what your name is . . . that your name is no bar to entering a competition like this, or to winning it” (20). But later, when the seed of doubt has sprouted in her, she makes an argument against the case, using a similar logic. In a fiery argument with an old friend, Claire asks him, “You, with your liberal causes, how do you reconcile your support for Islam with your support for gay rights, for feminism, when you look at how women, or gays, or minorities are treated in so many Muslim countries?” “That’s not the kind of Muslim Khan is,” he responds. “But then it’s your litmus test—the ‘acceptable’ Muslims are the ones who agree with you,” she says (229). Mo’s paradox of the beard and Rubin’s loop of “unsuitability” find a third commensurate case, the question of the “acceptable Muslim.” Focusing on the rhetorical borrowing from the American notions of exceptional freedom and tolerance to offer an argument for intolerance is particularly illuminating because it highlights another aspect of the aforementioned “imaginative paucity.” Claire’s defense of Khan does not lose its energy because of his beliefs. In fact, as noted before, his personal beliefs—including those that allegedly affected his design—are even uncertain to himself. What makes Khan’s case problematic for Claire has very little to do with Khan’s faith; it is the inability of her own seemingly objective criteria to guide her decision. In this post-9/11 chaos, the discrepancy between what Claire as the civil defender of social values wants and what the grieving widow of a 9/11 victim is obliged to want marks the inadequacy of the ideological discourse in the midst of grief, panic, and hatred. The chaos itself, one has to note, is the product of this ideological discourse; therefore, the personal dilemmas, embodied in at least the three highlighted cases in the novel, are fruits of a discourse that proves insufficient to resolve them. The novel at this point reaches gridlock. Personal values and public roles are too conflated, and ideological maxims are too conflicting, to provide a way out for the narrative. The indecision, reflected in Mo’s problem with his appearance and Claire’s lack of confidence to support the design, spreads throughout the whole novel. The key to an exit is offered by a character that was so far silently living in the periphery: Asma, an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant, who lives in a poor district of New York City, under the officials’ radar. Her husband, a janitor in the World Trade Center, perished in the terrorist attack, and she, like many other family members of the victims, follows the controversy of the memorial as closely as possible. She maintains an almost invisible presence throughout the narrative until the day of the public hearing. There, amid the people opposing or supporting the designer, she sits to listen to Mo and others and, just before adjournment of the session, raises her hand to talk. All the voices heard so far are Muslims or Muslim-sympathizers on the one side and survivors and the grieving family members on the other.

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But Asma is both. Her vindication of the designer, translated into English by a friend, shakes the event, becomes a headline instantaneously, and shifts the balance of opinions in Khan’s favor. Asma’s peculiar position within the political debate turns everything upside down, but interestingly, her vociferous defense of the Muslim architect brims with the same problematic exceptionalism and the same paucity of imagination that has brought about all the turmoil in the first place. “I think a garden is right,” she says, “because that is what America is—all the people Muslim and non-Muslim, who have come and grown together. How can you pretend we and our traditions are not part of this place?” (260–61). Asma’s sudden entrance into the heart of the narrative brings a faint ray of relief to the congested trail of events, but her reference to American values as the key for redemption, instead of, say, arguing against the fundamental shortcomings of the whole discourse, brings her down from a possible savior of the strife to another player in the game of opinions. Asma’s appearance does not resolve the problem and, in fact, extends it to another level. Her own status as an illegal immigrant is revealed in a few days, and she is forced to leave the country. On the day of her departure, in the company of hundreds of people coming to bid her farewell, she is stabbed by an anonymous person and dies on the pavement. Her death, instead of her public defense, provides a resolution for the story, as Mo, heartbroken by the news, decides to voluntarily withdraw from the competition to simply end the calamitous chain of events that has progressed much too far. While Asma’s death is not explicitly linked to any of the political fronts in the public debate, and her murder case remains unsolved, the way she is killed makes a subtle reference to an American historical case that implies, not a causal link, nor an allegorical connection, but a similarity in the framework of imagination: the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. Quite like Oswald, Asma is an insignificant person, rising in a day from anonymity to the front page of every newspaper, and like him, her presence showcases, even against her will, a puzzling mixture of patriotism and anti-Americanism, making her the object of praise and derision from the public. Quite like Oswald, Asma is killed when she is finding her way in the throng of people squeezing around her. There are, of course, many differences between the two, but the fact that Asma’s assassination is pictured in a way that can be reminiscent of Oswald’s case indicates another paucity of imagination. The novel seems unable, or unwilling, to present the unprecedented rise of Islamophobia with its own intricate challenges without reducing it to a re-embodiment of a previous chapter of American history. While this would not curtail the novel’s audacity and authenticity in portraying the deadlocks of ideological discourses regarding Islamophobia, it renders visible the real depth of the problem. The problem of Islamophobia is not rectified, even momentarily, in the novel, not only because Asma’s position yields to the same problem but also because her death becomes

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significant in a pre-9/11 American frame of reference. In criticizing the novel for not assigning Islamophobia its own unique status in contemporary America, one will become susceptible to a counterproductive essentialism—as if dealing with Islam in America requires an exceptionally different set of arguments, which then will fuel binarisms such as race/ religion. But if, on the other hand, one tries to analyze this problem by drawing parallels with previous cases of political anxiety in America, one will neglect the exclusive features of the problem at hand, inevitably increasing its tension. The novel’s—witting or unwitting—parallel between Asma and Oswald simply demonstrates the inefficiency of the current political dialogue in the face of post-9/11 rise of Islamophobia. The polyphonic narrative of The Submission produces an elaborate simulation of a panicked society, entangled in its own limited political imagination and perpetually worsening those limitations, like a knot that becomes tighter as one pulls. Mo, Claire, and Asma, all within their own paradoxical conditions, try their best to escape the confining modes of thought that surround them, and each tries to do so by adherence to the social values they uphold, unaware of the fact that the problem lies in the incongruity of those values. The novel’s tactful representation of the problematic structure of imagination that cannot fix its own oxymoronic condition is quite unique in the post-9/11 subgenre of fiction. Its engagement with issues that are usually eschewed in similar works is not only audacious but also illuminating for both its achievements and its shortcomings. WORKS CITED Amis, Martin. “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta.” New Yorker, April 24, 2006, 152–63. Print. Gray, Richard. “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis.” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (2008): 128–51. Print. Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print. Meer, Nasar. “The Politics of Voluntary and Involuntary Identities: Are Muslims in Britain an Ethnic, Racial or Religious Minority?” Patterns of Prejudice 42, no. 1 (2008): 61–81. Print. Meer, Nasar, and Tariq Modood. “The Racialisation of Muslims.” In Thinking through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives, edited by Salman Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil, 69–84. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Print. Mishra, Pankaj. “The End of Innocence.” Guardian, May 19, 2007. Web. Pöhlmann, Sascha. “Collapsing Identities: The Representation and Imagination of the Terrorist in Falling Man.” In Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo, edited by Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. New York: Continuum, 2010. 40–50. Print. Sayyid, Salman, and AbdoolKarim Vakil, eds. Thinking through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Print. Stefon, Matt. “Taqyyia.” Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., n.d. Web.

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Tibi, Bassam. “Ethnicity of Fear? Islamic Migration and the Ethnicization of Islam in Europe.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 10, no. 1 (2010): 126–57. Print. Tyrer, David. The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy. London: Pluto, 2013. Print. Updike, John. Terrorist. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006. Print. Vakil, AbdoolKarim. “Is the Islam in Islamophobia the Same as Islam in Anti-Islam; Or, When Is it Islamophobia Time?” In Thinking through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives, edited by Salman Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil, 23–44. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Print. Waldman, Amy. The Submission. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011. Print.

NOTES 1. For a criticism of DeLillo’s novel regarding its terrorist character, see Mishra (2007) and Pöhlmann (2010). 2. Incidentally, the theme of beard is also brought into play in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. But a major difference between the two cases is that, while in Hamid’s novel, the protagonist’s beard is the mark of his gradual dissatisfaction with American values, in Waldman’s story, it becomes a sign of personal disturbance and confusion. Hamid’s “Changez” grows a beard to declare his retreat from Americanism, but Mo’s beard starts off at this bold assertion and leads to unexpected confusion and disarray. 3. The concept of taqyia—or as it is usually written, taqyyia—means “the practice of concealing one’s belief and foregoing ordinary religious duties when under threat of death or injury,” but historically, it was employed by Shias, “because of their historical persecution and political defeats not only by non-Muslims but also at the hands of the majority Sunni sect” (Stefon). The anti-Muslim activists in the novel take the concept completely out of its context to justify the claim that Muslims believe in lying whenever it is suitable. 4. For a thorough investigation of the historical and political relations between Islamophobia and racism, see the essays in the collection edited by Sayyid and Vakil (2011), especially the essays by Vakil (23–44) and Meer and Modood (69–84). 5. The common words for tomb are ghabr, maghbara, or madfan, but the Arabic translation of garden is hadigha. However, it was quite commonplace in the traditional Islamic culture to build a garden around the graveyard of a notable person or bury that person in a garden. What the television pundit states, therefore, is a twisted factoid, not a simple mistranslation.

SEVEN Strangers in a Homeland Veterans and “Innocensus” in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and The Yellow Birds Damon Barta

A now-familiar post-9/11 discourse of “America” has revived and reinvented the concept of “homeland.” This term, once used to describe the British empire and its colonies, and also apartheid-era South Africa, has now come to refer to space within U.S. borders. As it did in its previous uses, “homeland” connotes images and imagines affinities that subordinate geographic space to mythical construct. “The homeland” (a definite article is almost invariably used in the American context) evokes a sober reverence even as it expresses a troubling paradox central to consensus for ongoing American military aggression abroad. This paradox involves a recurring affirmation of innocence in American culture, a myth predicated on ahistorical and parochial interpretations of geopolitical realities that cast the United States as a reluctant but resolute participant in wars that it initiates, and is manifest in yet another valence of the term “homeland.” Though it had been used by numerous and varied immigrant constituents of the United States to refer to sundry origins abroad, the term came to refer to a monolithic, blameless national entity, obligated to respond to the always unwarranted aggression of foreign enemies. A recent wave of American literature on the war in Iraq reflects a significant complication to this narrative by staging confrontations between an American public conditioned by a myth of innocence and what Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn calls “the war made flesh” (39)—the physical presence of the combat veteran amid a populace that maintains its inno79

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cence by ritualistically deflecting its complicity in the violence it has authorized. Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012) and Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds (2012) depict two different kinds of homecomings that reveal distinct but interdependent valences of innocence as an instrument of consensus. Billy Lynn, on furlough from Iraq for a “Victory Tour,” encounters the prescriptive gestures of an ostensibly welcoming but ultimately aloof public. The scripted interactions between Lynn and this public reveal the acute disjunctions between mythic consensus and those who are made to act on it. Powers’s John Bartle loses his innocence in combat only to return to a populace that maintains its own by treating him as a necessary abjection of the war state. Unable to reintegrate due to trauma suffered in Iraq, Bartle is ultimately, and ironically, removed from society, arrested for a lack of decorum in disposing of a friend’s corpse in the Tigris River. These two novels offer compelling anatomies of what I call “innocensus,” the symbiotic relationship between the recurrent myth of American innocence and perennial consensus for military aggression. The authors of these novels represent two distinct vantages on innocensus. Fountain grew up in relative affluence, was educated at Duke, and practiced law before becoming a full-time fiction writer (George 51). Powers, who admits that no one was “beating down [his] door to offer [him] admission” to college, enlisted in the army at age seventeen and later served as a machine gunner in Iraq before earning his MFA in creative writing (Crown). While the cultural authority that has long been attributed to writers, like Powers, who were “there” is worth serious consideration, those who have spent wartime amid the bourgeois culture that has brought them “there,” like Fountain, offer incisive and complementary insight into the narratives of innocence that have produced both soldier and civilian. Though Powers is able to offer sobering accounts of military conflict predicated on experience, his novel should not be thought of, in this context, as an “authentic” alternative to Fountain’s sometimes irreverent and entirely imagined one. Rather, each kind of narrative can be seen as a distinct but interrelated component of a contemporary corpus of war literature that reveals the ongoing interplay of myth and reality in U.S. culture. Fountain dramatizes this interplay in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by focalizing public reactions to combat veterans through the titular character, who has returned from Iraq with his platoon to be honored in various locales and venues by a grateful but naive public. The novel opens with the final stop of Bravo Company’s so-called Victory Tour: a Thanksgiving Day football game at Texas Stadium, which serves as Fountain’s microcosm of the homeland. Home of the Dallas Cowboys, aka “America’s Team,” the stadium has been “imbued” with “mystery and romance” (10) by television and contains “dollops of state and national pride” (10). This “sheltering womb of all things American” (21)

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encloses “all shapes, ages, sizes, colors, and income indicators” (22) and, Lynn uneasily notes, “a backdoor link between the stadium and his family” (11). Once inside, Lynn becomes acutely aware of his relation to the “three hundred million well-wishing fellow citizens” (21). Lynn comes to imagine them as “his” people, and “Oh, my people” becomes a doleful refrain in the novel, usually coupled with Lynn’s wistful observations about them. Despite the praise and adulation offered to the members of Bravo Company at every turn by “his” people, Lynn’s affinity is only superficially reciprocated. Instead of being included by them as a participant in dialogues about the war, Lynn serves as a sort of talisman in a ritual that validates “their” innocence. John Shelton Lawrence notes the heightened importance of “rituals of national innocence” after 9/11, and he asserts that such rituals have been instrumental in generating consensus for the open-ended antiterror excursions and preemptive wars carried out in the name of “Homeland defense” (35). His analysis of such rituals focuses on commemorative ceremonies and other large-scale public events, but his notion of “public ritual” also aptly describes the kinds of prosaic and repetitive exchanges between civilian and soldier depicted in Fountain’s novel. As Rachel Tsang points out, ritual, defined as “expressive behaviour” that is “stylized and patterned” (3) takes place on a number of social levels and varies in form from the “highly stylized and tightly regulated” behaviors of public ceremony to the “more spontaneous” nature of “everyday mundane activities” (3–4). The “expressions of sentiment” that Lawrence argues drive commemoration by a public eager to be included, but reluctant to accept responsibility (35), are enacted on a smaller scale in the unqualified praise, effusive thanks, and ingratiating commentary about the war that occurs at every turn in Texas Stadium. Such expressions fulfill a symbolic need for the purveyors of sentiment even as they further estrange Lynn from “his” people. Indeed, Lynn comes to recognize that the “abyss [that] separates the war over here from the war over there” (197) is present in every interaction he has with them. Lynn is consistently amazed by the “frenzied speech patterns” and “gibberish” that “[spill] from the mouths of seemingly well-adjusted citizens” (37), and he reflects the privilege of “the act of speaking” over the substance of the speech in his privileging of verbs over objects in his recollections of these exchanges: “We appreciate. . . . We cherish and bless. We pray, hope, honor-respect-love-and-revere” (37). Lynn is also aware that his role in the ritual necessitates certain conventions, though he adopts them “more or less by instinct” as “way[s] of being” that are enacted “without having to think about it too much” (37). His reflexive reception and reflection of the sentiments offered implicate him in a ritual of commiseration that demands particular responses. As people approach to enact the ritual, he “rises and assumes the stance . . . back straight, weight balanced centermass” and dons a “reserved yet courteous expression.” He lets his eyes

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“seem a little tired” as he “say[s] a few words” and “smile[s] occasionally” (37). These rote words and gestures validate the sentiments offered, though Lynn can hardly be said to have participated. Instead, he serves as a totemic object in a ritual that confers or confirms nominal membership in a national group while insulating the initiate from the responsibilities of membership. Fountain often uses spatial prosody and phonetic emphasis to illustrate the ritualistic nature of these exchanges. Words like “terrRr,” “Eyerack,” “nina leven,” “freedoms,” “double y’im dees,” and “dih-mockcruh-see” (words that, among other functions, succinctly denote the various rationales for war offered by the Bush administration for the Iraq War) are stretched out across entire pages in spatial arrangements that suggest rhythms and create aesthetic patterns while removing these words from any context that could explain them or betray their complexity. Fountain further isolates these signifiers from their referents by breaking the words down into sound components that seem to comfort the speakers as they are rhythmically repeated. The aurality and repetition of phonemes like “nina leven” and “terrRr” act as an incantation meant to elicit the “instinctive” responses that Lynn admits to himself are “a furnished way of being” (37). The more conscious Lynn is of these responses the more difficult they are to produce, but his occasionally lackluster and sometimes ambivalent responses to these incantations do not seem to dampen the fervor of those who offer them, and he ultimately finds these encounters “weird and frightening” (38). Lynn hypothesizes that he serves as the “contact point” for a “mystical transference” in which “his ordeal becomes theirs” (39) and, as they imagine it, “vice versa” (39). Yet, Lynn’s participation in the ritual is rigidly circumscribed, and he dutifully “cough[s] up nonsequential mumblings” of affirmation as a “stranger” in his head “whisper[s] the truer words that [he] couldn't speak” (40). Just as such rituals mute the response of this “stranger” who bespeaks the gruesome realities and existential immediacy of combat, they mute the responsibility of the citizen who has authorized it. While Lynn’s exchanges with “his” people constitute rituals that are much smaller in scale than a public vigil at Ground Zero or a national moment of silence, these exchanges occur at a far higher frequency and function in essentially the same way: to include participants in a national community and to exonerate them from acts of violence committed on behalf of this community. Lawrence frames this twofold function as a “transfusion of innocence” in which “those who die or suffer on behalf of the nation” are used as “proxies for the innocence of the nation” (37). Though Lynn suspects that “Americans secretly know better,” he recognizes that “something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of selfjustifying pity” (11). This drama, played out in the ritual adulation of combat veterans, provides a spurious, if soothing, balm to the citizens of

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Fountain’s homeland, whose innocence is contingent on the righteousness of the soldiers. The operations of such rituals evoke one of the primary rhetorical devices by which the homeland security state has procured consensus for its wars—ensuring the imagined innocence of its civilian populace by separating its citizens from its enforcers. “Americans are praying with you,” President Bush assured the military in 2003, tacitly assuring those within the borders of the homeland that they would remain unsullied by the aggression carried out in their name. In Bush’s rhetoric, there are “Americans,” and there are proxies, and though they may or may not be praying together, these two entities are not to be conflated. Christina Knopf aptly anatomizes the conspicuous contrast between the use of collective pronouns by Roosevelt and Johnson to foster consensus during World War II and Vietnam and President Bush’s separation of the military from the larger body of citizens. As Knopf observes, the prayers of Bush’s Americans are “for the safety of your loved ones and for the protection of the innocent” (cited in Knopf 183). This statement, emblematic of a consistent pattern, both captures the rhetorical othering of the American soldier and implies inclusion of the stateside American populace in its conspicuously vague allusion to “protection of the innocent.” This kind of rhetorical maneuver reflects the public’s willful distance from the business of war, and the “mystical transference” of the combatveteran ritual confers inclusion without violating this distance. This enables one of Fountain’s Americans to proclaim in all earnestness that “we don’t attack unless we’re attacked first” (202) [italics mine], thus actuating what Billy Lynn recognizes as “a superseding reality that trumps even the experiential truths of a grunt on the ground” (243). The gap between these realities is provisionally reconciled for the citizen in the ritual but only because the soldier has already been rhetorically separated from him. Ultimately, this estrangement of soldier and civilian is reciprocal, as Lynn’s “people” become other for him as well—“They are the ones in charge,” he concludes, “these saps, these innocents” (306) [italics mine]. By the time he returns to Iraq, Lynn has been convinced that “their homeland dream is the dominant force” (306). Billy Lynn must return to the experiential truths of the grunt in Iraq, but the homecoming of Kevin Powers’s John Bartle is presumably permanent and his reckoning with the “homeland dream” ongoing. Bartle’s experiential truths and the homeland dream are put at odds immediately after returning to the United States, as illustrated by an exchange between Bartle and an airport bartender, whose apparent empathy quickly degenerates into bigotry and jingoism. “‘I just hate that y’all have to be over there,’” he laments before advocating a nuclear attack on “sand niggers,” flaunting the yellow ribbon above his bar and offering free drinks (104). Bartle resists this attempted enactment of ritual and the validation of the spurious but “superseding reality” that it represents. He

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does not return the man’s solicitous smile, and he insists on paying for his drinks. As Bartle explains, “I didn’t want to smile and say thanks. Didn’t want to pretend I’d done anything but survive” (106). Once on the plane bound for Virginia, he is heralded by the pilot as “an American hero,” but in this instance, Bartle has no way to respond directly, as a spatial distance and a locked cockpit door literally separate him from the speaker. An already weary Bartle is compelled by this distance to submit to the ritual. “Fuck it,” he thinks and accepts the free drinks subsequently brought to him (106). While Billy Lynn reluctantly defers to the rituals of “his” people, Bartle avoids people at home entirely, realizing that his ability to resist such rituals is limited and fearing the further estrangement they engender. While Bartle manages to stay clear of the living, he is unable to elude the dead. “The ghosts of the dead” Bartle finds upon his homecoming in “the empty seats of every gate” (104) follow him back to Virginia and come to inhabit his dreams, where Bartle must negotiate their palpable presence with the “emptiness [he] still call[ed] home” (110). The cherubic Murph endures in Bartle’s consciousness as a ghost whose innocence is perpetually enshrined by his death, one that Bartle measures against his shame and guilt. Murph is bound to Bartle by both fiat (Sterling tells Murph to “get in Bartle’s back pocket”) and oath (Bartle promises Murph’s mother that he will “bring him home to her”), and he describes him in many instances as an extension of himself. He recalls how “Murph’s breath was a steady comfort,” how he “had grown accustomed to . . . the way his muscles visibly bucked and tensed beneath his gear” (6), how they often “leaned against each other until the weight of [their] bodies found their balance” (16), and how they “looked at each other as if into a dim mirror” (79). After Bartle participates in a lethal firefight, he feels separated from his guileless friend, and his burgeoning sense of guilt further escalates upon Murph’s death. Throughout the post-Iraq portions of the novel, Bartle obsesses about Murph’s death and the failed promise to bring him home, and Murph’s spectral presence looms over Bartle’s inability and refusal to interact with the people back home. The voice of Shroom, a Bravo compatriot who died in Billy Lynn’s lap at Al-Ansakar Canal, similarly haunts Lynn. Lynn and Shroom have a bond that supersedes the most intimate ones available in a domestic heteronormative world, and Lynn feels “his soul pass through [him]” as he dies, the death of a love that “ruined him for anything else” (218). Now just a recurring voice in his head, Lynn recalls him “cheer[ing] with sick abandon” in “savage mockery” of Dick Cheney and wonders of his present situation, “What would Shroom do?” Lynn feels that he “needs Shroom to make sense of the situation, to calm the neural scramble of [his] brain” (296). Lynn recalls Shroom’s nuanced appraisals of cultural forces that stand in stark contrast to the unqualified acceptance of platitudes by “his people.” An avid reader, Shroom knew “lots of useless

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stuff” (62), such as the psychology of behavior modification (62), existential parables about Inuit shamans (27), and the debts of Christianity to Sumerian myth (186). Shroom’s voice remains embedded in Lynn’s consciousness, and this voice often appears in close proximity to the platitudes offered to him by “his” people. Shroom’s critical stance toward the war and his erudition provide a conspicuous contrast to the facile sentimentality of the “saps” that have to a large extent determined his, and Lynn’s, fate. The estrangement of Billy Lynn and John Bartle from “their people” is a psychic fracture that can be better understood in relation to their deceased companions. Both narrators depict a unity or close affinity between themselves and these companions before death, followed by an unhealable rift, and a haunting—a sequence that reveals much about the circulation of innocence in the homeland. These absent figures, as internalized voices, intervene in the discourse of the homeland by disrupting the rituals of innocence depicted in both novels. While these hauntings and the conflicts they foster in the psyches of the protagonists of these novels illustrate the depth of estrangement that each suffers, they also reflect a significant tension implicit in the symbolic paradigm of post-9/11 America. “Ground Zero,” the symbolic expression of the former site of the World Trade Center, can be seen as the birth site of the symbolic paradigm of the homeland, a broader and more malleable mythic space than Ground Zero but equally haunted. Ground Zero, as Amy Kaplan writes, “might be thought of as an uncanny location,” one that “entails the return of the repressed as something at once threatening, external, and unrecognizable, yet strangely familiar and inseparable from our own pasts” (84). This strange familiarity lies in its visual and symbolic evocation of the burnt cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the original referent of “Ground Zero,” as well as the villages destroyed by Americans in Vietnam, the genocidal carnage of the “Indian Wars” in the nineteenth-century American West, and the decimated South of the American Civil War. All of this historic violence is necessarily repressed in the assertion of the American Ground Zero as a site of “lost innocence.” As a progeny of Ground Zero, the homeland expresses the paradox implicit in assertions of American innocence that coexist uneasily with a history of U.S. violence. The rituals initiated by Fountain’s and Powers’s Americans, to whom the war is a remote, but necessary, enterprise, can be seen as a means of symbolically resolving this tension. As the ritual is enacted, they validate their membership in the homeland without acknowledging their complicity in past and present brutal and racially inflected violence that this identification implicates. The soldiers in these novels are compelled by these rituals to bear the full burden of this violence by stifling the moral ambiguity and guilt they feel about combat. This repression exacerbates an estrangement between them and their societies, and it perpetuates the projection of this domestic estrangement onto amor-

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phous foreign sources. This projection arises from the violation of “home” that occurred on 9/11 and the subsequent construction of the “homeland” in its stead, which suggests a metaphoric exile of the American that requires an ongoing attrition of other “homelands,” such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq. The guarantor of success in these openended campaigns of attrition is the history of demonstrably brutal campaigns the United States has undertaken in the past, both on its own soil and in other nations. The unspoken realities of violence that Lynn and Bartle harbor while their compatriots shower them with approval can be seen as a reflection of this unspoken history of U.S. violence that mutely assures its citizens that this attrition is possible—as an assurance of a mighty American response to the amorphous “terrorists.” As Donald Pease suggests, “Operation Infinite Justice and Operation Iraqi Freedom invited their audiences to take scopic pleasure in the return of memories of the unprovoked aggression that the colonial settlers had previously exerted against native populations” (172–73). In other words, Americans take comfort, subconsciously, in past success at “frontier conquest” as a bellwether for future success at “homeland defense.” Indeed, “homeland defense” is the rhetorical realization of this logic, casting the elective and offensive military campaign of the United States in Iraq as necessary and defensive. While the “pleasure” Pease attributes to American audiences may be an overstatement, there is certainly a fascination with a perennial American capacity for aggression exhibited in both novels, as “Lynn’s people” praise the drama of the television footage from Al-Ansakar Canal and “Bartle’s people” offer free drinks for killing “sand niggers.” This fascination cannot be shared by Lynn and Bartle, who, as participants in violence, have no “scopic” remove from it. The two embody the chasms between collective will and individual experience, between collective denial and individual responsibility, that have arisen in each character’s symbolic displacement from home. While the ghosts of their dead companions confront them directly, the specters of innocent masses linger on the margins of the homeland that their societies have embraced. The chasms only deepen for Bartle. The disparities of “an unshared year” (103) become even more pronounced as he attempts to resettle himself in his hometown, where he contemplates the frivolity and comfort of those around him, an innocence maintained at the expense of his own. As he watches old friends frolic in the water of the James River, Bartle must “resist the urge to hate them” (143) for their blithe enjoyment of a home unspoiled by the ghosts that make home an uncanny nightmare for Bartle. He cannot reconcile the brutality of his acts in Iraq, and the senseless loss of Murph, with the incessant praise he receives from his fellow citizens. “Everybody is so fucking happy to see you,” Bartle bitterly observes, “the murderer, the fucking accomplice, the at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country

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down, you want to burn every goddamn yellow ribbon in sight” (145). Bartle’s assessment of the innocence ritual is clearly less forgiving than that of Billy Lynn, and he more ardently resists the demands of its incantation. His resistance, however, bears a high cost, as his refusal to participate (or, in terms of his Melvillian namesake, Bartleby, his “preference not to”) leads to total estrangement from his society, increasing physical torpor, and profound psychic decay. While Bartle’s people would prefer to bring Bartle back into the fold on their terms, Bartle’s disaffection belies these terms. So too does the novel deny readers a comfortable remove from which to insulate themselves against complicity. The structure of the novel, in which Powers temporally juxtaposes Bartle’s chaotic tour in Iraq with his disaffected homecoming in a momentous trajectory toward Murph’s death, creates significant effects at the level of both the enclosed narrative and its reception. As Benjamin Percy of the New York Times has noted, “Because [readers] lean forward instead of back, because they participate in piecing together the puzzle, they are made more culpable” (“Ground”). The novel’s structure also mirrors the superimposition of memory on the present that Bartle experiences as he recounts the war. This allows the forwardleaning reader of The Yellow Birds to trace Bartle’s utter estrangement from “his” people to his first kill in a firefight near Al Tafar. “In that moment,” explains Bartle, I disowned the waters of my youth. My memories of them became a useless luxury, their names as foreign as any that could be found in Nineveh: the Tigris or the Chesapeake, the James or the Shatt al Arab farther to the south, all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own. I was an intruder, at best a visitor, and would be even in my own home. (125)

Notably, Murph begins to avoid Bartle after he is decorated in an “unasked-for-ceremony” for his lethal actions, and, reciprocally, Murph, still unsullied, seems “opaque” to Bartle. Opacity is also an aspect of the novel’s participatory form. Bartle’s oscillation between memories of Iraq and memories of his homecoming, both narrated from a point still further in the future, create uncanny resonances as impressions from the past are “echoed” by those in the future, though the future impressions are the first to be narrated. Not only are readers made “more culpable” by the temporal juxtapositions of the novel, but also they are compelled to experience the uncanny effect, the “strangely familiar” sense of violence, that, for them, has yet to happen but to Bartle has already happened, an effect that mirrors the dynamics of guilt and innocence in the homeland. Bartle feels himself an intruder, a visitor, and, like Billy Lynn, a “stranger” in the homeland. He takes upon himself an oppressive burden of guilt that would more appropriately be disseminated among the wellwishers and glad-handers that have tacitly authorized his participation in

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the violence in Iraq. The effect of his proxy assumption of an entire society’s unclaimed guilt (an inversion of the innocence ritual) is, tellingly, pathological, and Bartle describes it as such. “I had become a cripple,” he explains, “They should all hate me for what I’ve done but everyone loves me for it and it’s driving me crazy” (143). While Bartle’s behavior could be attributed to PTSD, this is never mentioned in the novel, and Bartle articulates a salient logic that underscores the contradiction between the actions of the soldier and ethics of the citizen and belies its dismissal as the projection of a shell-shocked vet. Bartle is vexed by the fact that “there is no making up for what you are doing, you’re taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever” (144). Bartle had joined the military to avoid accountability—to be freed of the responsibilities of making decisions about how, when, and where to act. Yet, his encounters with homelanders upon his return from Iraq confers the realization that many of these decisions have been deferred to those who will simply transfer accountability back to him to insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions. Bartle’s “freedom” from responsibility is short lived. He has been in the army only two years when he is introduced to Murph. From his vantage in the near future, Bartle juxtaposes this introduction with his early impressions of army life. Bartle recalls “feeling relief in basic while everyone else was frantic with fear,” knowing he’d “never have to make a decision again” (34), but he reflects that “freedom is not the same thing as the absence of accountability” (35), a statement that increases in significance as he goes on to relate his reluctant but escalating accountability to Murph. From the time Sterling charges him with the care of Murph, Bartle “didn’t want to be responsible for him” (36). Still, he recognizes that this was “not his [Murph’s] fault” (36) and sympathizes, as a fellow small-town Virginian, with his need to be “where life needed no elaboration” (37). He is still resisting accountability when Murph’s mother elicits his promise “to bring him home to [her]” (47), a promise that he makes despite its implication of forces beyond his control. Bartle suggests, again in hindsight, that he may have broken this promise when he does not immediately console Murph after they witness the death of a compatriot in a firefight. Bartle’s retrospection fixates on contingencies, hoping to find “one moment,” “one cause,” or “one thing [he] would not be guilty of” (155), but he cannot find any of these. He fantasizes about inverting the situation, being killed and Murph having to care for his body (158), a transposition of responsibility that symbolically reverses the “transfusion of innocence” imposed upon him. Bartle’s inability to reintegrate into his society, whether an effect of PTSD or the result of a rational assessment of the moral incongruities of that society, represents a challenge to “innocensus,” and in Powers’s novel, such challenges do not go unanswered. “Someone had to be pun-

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ished,” Bartle understands, “Which articles we’d be charged under, didn’t seem to matter” (179). Indeed, though the CID captain who comes to arrest Bartle refers vaguely to a letter that Bartle wrote to Murph’s mother, it remains unclear what Bartle is ultimately charged with and why he goes to prison. It appears as though the charges have something to do with improper disposal of Murph’s corpse, which, according to protocol, should have been flown home but was instead set adrift by Bartle and Sergeant Sterling in the Tigris River. The irony of being charged and imprisoned for a violation of decorum while the attendant murder of an innocent Iraqi man who bore witness to the corpse’s disposal goes unaccounted for is particularly significant. It adds to the ambiguity about guilt and punishment that surrounds Bartle’s arrest and imprisonment. This ambiguity prevents readers from assigning individual culpability and dismissing the more complex web of sociopolitical behavior within which it exists. Rather, it invites readers to think more broadly about the guilt, innocence, and complicity of an entire polity, of the price of acquiescence to American myth, and of those who are estranged in a tacit embrace of innocensus. While innocence has long been an instrument of consensus in American culture, its most recent iteration is particularly pointed and potent. In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration cultivated a consensus that enabled its agenda by offering a new symbolic order that pivots on the metaphor of the homeland. This term is an attempt to bolster American identification with a new political order predicated on preemptive and open-ended warfare, yet as Kaplan notes, it “connotes an inexorable connection to a place deeply rooted in the past” (84). While it tethers the arguably more concrete noun “land” to the more ephemeral word “home” to project these roots, the contradictory history of the term belies the cohesion and stability that it tries to convey, and this appendage has not prevented contemporary American authors from interrogating the more slippery word in this obfuscatory compound (e.g., Saunders, Morrison, Klay, and Hoffman). As Kaplan observes, “The notion of the nation as a home, as a domestic space, relies structurally on its intimate opposition to the notion of the foreign” (86). This dichotomy, in turn, relies on a similarly dichotomous paradigm of guilt and innocence. Bartle’s companion Murph remains a figure of innocence but does not survive because, as Sterling points out, he is mentally “home” before he should be (156). Conversely, Bartle’s guilt and shame preclude him from ever truly being “home” as he once knew it. This negotiation of guilt and innocence mirrors a negotiation of foreign and domestic that can be seen in Powers’s physical and psychic geography of the homeland. The Tigris River in Iraq, where Bartle sets the corpse of Murph adrift, and the James River in Virginia, where Bartle tries to drown himself, are ostensibly foreign and domestic sites. Yet, while Murph is “home” psychically, he never returns physically, and Bartle, conversely, returns home physically only

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to find that “the emptiness [he] still called home” (110) is psychically uninhabitable. This inversion of foreign and domestic space and its attendant attributions of guilt and innocence are further demonstrated by the liminal spaces of Germany and the Atlantic Ocean. Bartle feels “acutely and overwhelmingly foreign” (59) in Germany, the point of transfer between the war theater and the United States. This transitory space gives way to another. The Atlantic Ocean, too, is a liminal space that Bartle describes as “the last obstacle to home, the land of the free, of reality television, outlet malls and deep vein thrombosis” (101), and it mirrors a psychic liminality in Bartle, who looks down at the water to see “crests becoming troughs . . . like the breaking of some ancient treaty between all those things that stand in opposition to one another” (102). In this space of negotiation, the separation between him and Murph, the guilty and the innocent, the foreign and domestic, the “home” and “not home,” briefly collapses. These concepts converge and reveal their interdependence as Bartle “echoes” a previous plea of Murph’s, a plea as yet unknown to the reader, who will later be propelled back in time to hear this “echo” from the “future,” when the fates of Bartle and Murph have already been decided. As Bartle’s flight approaches the United States, he fumbles with the phrase, “I want to go . . . ,” and only upon his descent does he recall the critical last word: “I want to go home” (102). When Bartle arrives, his mother welcomes him with the assurance that he is “‘home,’” but Bartle “[does] not believe her” (109), an incredulity that prefigures his inability to reconcile his deeds in Iraq with the society that has sanctioned them. He has already become “overwhelmingly foreign” in his own country. The frailty of home for the protagonists of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and The Yellow Birds is put most succinctly by Billy Lynn in his response to a stock question from a reporter. “What does it mean to be home for Thanksgiving this year?” she asks, to which Billy replies, “I’m not at home. I’m here” (143). Like Bartle, Lynn simultaneously exists in “domestic” and “foreign” space, while “his” people continue to espouse a tidy binary between the two. Fountain and Powers deftly anatomize the most surprising of the many troubling exclusions enabled by this dichotomy: that of American combat veterans, whose experiences are incompatible with the notions of innocence that have allowed Americans to authorize armed aggression and their leaders to enact it. Fountain and Powers have each staged potent interventions in American rituals of innocence that strip away the doublespeak in the discourse of the homeland and compel readers to face its exclusions, deny its affirmations of innocence, and resist facile inclusion in the narrow concept of nation implicit in such rituals.

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WORKS CITED Crown, Sarah. “Kevin Powers on The Yellow Birds: ‘I Felt Those Things, and Asked the Same Questions.’” Guardian, November, 13 2012. Web. February 6, 2014. Fountain, Ben. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. New York: Harper, 2012. Print. George, Ben. “A Conversation with Ben Fountain.” Ecotone 5, no. 2 (2010): 49–61. Print. Kaplan, Amy. Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print. ———. “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space.” Radical History Review 85 (2003): 82–93. Print. Knopf, Christina M. “Those Who Bear the Heaviest Burden: Warfare and American Exceptionalism in the Age of Entitlement.” In The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism: Critical Essays edited by Jason A. Edwards and David Weiss, 171–88. London: McFarland, 2011. Print. Lawrence, John Shelton. “Rituals of Mourning and National Innocence.” Journal of American Culture 28, no. 1 (2005): 35–48. Print. Pease, Donald E. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Print. Percy, Benjamin. “On the Ground.” Review of The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers. New York Times, October 4, 2012. Web. February 6, 2014. Powers, Kevin. The Yellow Birds: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2012. Print. Tsang, Rachel. “Ritual and Performance in the Study of Nations and Nationalism.” In The Cultural Politics of Nationalism and Nation-Building: Ritual and Performance in the Forging of Nations, edited by Rachel Tsang and Eric Woods, 1–17. New York: Routledge, 2014. Print.

EIGHT “Our New Customer Is the Bush Administration?” Questioning Cultural Identity and Governmental Surveillance in Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector Paul Petrovic

Allegra Goodman’s fiction traverses themes of Jewish cultural assimilation and has been studied, as Maya Socolovsky notes, for its “interplay of orthodoxy, domesticity, and feminism” (“Southern Discomfort” 34). Since her breakthrough novel Kaaterskill Falls (1998), Goodman’s works have grown increasingly multifaceted in their use of contemporary settings that examine the ways in which individuals navigate family heritage and the twinned forces of commerce and ethics. The Cookbook Collector (2010) is her most prominent achievement in this regard, serving not only as an indictment of the corporate interests that rose out of the late1990s gilded tech bubble but also as a chronicle for how emerging innovative technologies were sold to an American government overhauling itself and its post-9/11 national-security architecture, until online surveillance became standard operating procedure. Against these interests of surveillance and data mining, Goodman records an alternate policy, one that is not regulated or monetized by either the Bush administration or the U.S. government, a policy that, instead, aligns with and connects to her earlier fiction—a focus, as Derek Parker Royal suggests, “on the recreation of cultural origins through discourses on homecoming and home space” (4). The Cookbook Collector intimates that a focus on origins and 93

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cultural identity displaces the malignancy of an unfettered government and the attendant bureaucracies that proliferate after 9/11. The Cookbook Collector’s cultural resistance, embedded in the mobilization of familial and social discourses, is thus a dynamic negotiation with and counternarrative to the regulatory politics of post-9/11 culture. Goodman’s fiction echoes other post-9/11 texts, such as Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), by examining the tectonic shifts in national identity from a pre-9/11 America consumed with petty self-interest to a newly vulnerable and searching population after September 11. However, far from Richard Gray’s postulation that these novels recast “a turning point in national and international history to little more than a stage in a sentimental education” (134), The Cookbook Collector especially levels trenchant criticism at both administrative and capital interest. These moments of criticism are not incidental to the thematic arc of the novel; rather, Goodman’s novel is predicated on exploring character as well as national-policy overhauls in an economy where corporate interests merge seamlessly with the newly erected defense by the Department of Homeland Security. When lower-level online-security employees in Goodman’s novel raise concerns over the deployment of this surveillance technology, their reservations are minimized by executives who desire compliance with and revenue from the status quo. The novel thus records the relationship between public safety and corporate profiteering immediately following the terrorist attacks on 9/11. In doing so, The Cookbook Collector critiques the geopolitical willingness to exploit technology as governmental practices further the cause of blind American exceptionalism. Goodman’s novel epitomizes the idea of the second wave of post-9/11 literature, expanding upon the narrative tropes common in the first wave published in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks. The first wave typically deliberates on the horror that transpires as individuals either escape, directly witness, or televisually witness the World Trade Towers being struck and then deal with all of the resultant fallout in New York City; the worst of this fiction becomes so politically blind that it strips 9/11 of any meaningful social context, treating the atrocity of 9/11 in a historical vacuum. What I characterize as the second wave of post-9/ 11 literature, which begins with Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006) but truly resurfaces with a flood of post-9/11 literary responses after President Barack Obama’s first election, contextualizes 9/11 within a continuum of political atrocities, highlighting the nearsightedness of America’s governmental and bureaucratic leadership even as it recalibrates the ideology of national victimhood that circulated immediately after the attacks. This sense of victimization is a part of the broader, economic interests in post9/11 America, with the first-wave texts, intentionally or otherwise, operating as a codification of the victim ideology, insulating Americans

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against any contradictory narrative. Second-wave post-9/11 media forms a critical apparatus that indicts fundamental notions of American exceptionalism. Charting the rhetoric of national exceptionalism woven into American culture from John Winthrop’s City on the Hill speech through the Cold War, Donald Pease studies the country’s political rhetoric and explains, “American exceptionalism was a political doctrine as well as a regulatory fantasy that enabled U.S. citizens to define, support, and defend the U.S. national fantasy” (11). Significant to post-9/11 culture, however, is the fact that governmental institutions regulate and codify the national fantasy. In turn, the individual sees his or her rights subsumed by a technological practice of preventative, though predatory, defense. Within this context, Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector argues that such misappropriation of technological trust endangers the sanctity of individual security and identity in a world economy. While structured around an ensemble of characters and narrative perspectives, The Cookbook Collector largely concerns three sets of characters balancing a high-wire act amid, as Ranen Omer-Sherman writes of Goodman’s fiction, “the struggle between continuity and adaptiveness” (78). Business-minded entrepreneur Emily Bach, CEO of online data-security storage company Veritech, and her more carefree and philosophical younger sister Jessamine (Jess) epitomize these contradictory values, but others likewise do battle. George Friedman is a former employee at Microsoft, whose market shares from working on early versions of Excel afford him the luxury to be proprietor of Yorick’s Used and Rare Books in Berkeley, and is infatuated with Jess; Emily’s fiancé Jonathan Tilghman is a new cutthroat mogul of ISIS 1 profiting from online encryption services. Orion Steiner, though a vocal advocate of freeware, works with Jonathan and is conflicted when he considers how his childhood friend, Emily, does not see Jonathan’s changes in temperament toward pure capitalism, and Rabbi Nachum Helfgott, a Hasidic Jew conscious of ancestry and the environment, who loans Jess money so she can buy Veritech market shares before it goes public. Omer-Sherman maintains that in all of Goodman’s texts there exists “the possibility of extending the manifest plurality of the sacred text to the lived experience of human beings” (78). This spiritual dimension becomes most prominent in the latter half of the novel, when Rabbi Helfgott recognizes that Emily and Jess’s deceased mother, who had been shunned and ostracized by her English parents because she married a person of non-faith, is also the elder sister of his wife. While Jess ends the novel transformed from a nonobservant Jew to an observant Jew, invested in the ritualized customs and practices and, in doing so, synchronizing herself with the continuity of her Jewish ancestry, Emily ends in a more liminal space; she likewise connects with her overseas family but seeks experiential connectivity through the mundane rather than the sacred.

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Franzen’s Freedom, which appeared the same year as Goodman’s novel, is instructive as a brief digression because it highlights a simultaneously published record of how America is willing to traffic in exploitative and deleterious behavior at the expense of personal ethics. In Franzen’s novel, young Joey Berglund is not interested in the human collateral that occurred on 9/11 until he embarks on a business venture selling outmoded supply trucks to the military for the Second Iraq War. He feels neither duty nor a renewed patriotism in this enterprise; rather, he looks at this scheme merely as a way to procure capital. Joey dismisses the fact that, due to their antiquated nature, these vehicles are more susceptible to mortar rounds and other insurgent artillery fire. Franzen writes, “The week he’d then spent on Barrier Street had been the first truly adult week of his life. Sitting with Blake in the great-room, the dimensions of which were more modest than he’d remembered, he watched Fox News’s coverage of the assault on Baghdad and felt his long-standing resentment of 9/ 11 begin to dissolve” (396). Joey feels the insularity of his worldview break not because the events of 9/11 realigned the coordinates of his reality; instead, he sees reflected in the corporate sectors around him how financial profit outweighs public responsibility. The elements of human risk, and all of its attendant liabilities, are not a priority. Indeed, feelings of individual, as well as national, exceptionalism lead to Joey’s indulgence in economic exploitation of America’s war effort, and people die before Joey realizes his mistake, extricates himself from his predicament, and ultimately turns to a more sustainable coffee venture. Freedom’s critique of how the nouveau riche profit from immoral modes of commerce parallels with The Cookbook Collector’s appraisal, so that both exist as prescient accounts of the corporate corruption and highlight how difficult it is to remain principled in a contemporary climate. 2 Freedom, though, has received far more critical attention than The Cookbook Collector, which is a disservice to the latter’s complication of the rhetoric of post-9/11 political and cultural assimilation. Early on, against the rise of nouveau riche in The Cookbook Collector, a generational force that secures its revenue through the encryption and circulation of technological data, George Friedman is steadfast in his selfappointed commission to represent an older ideal. He himself reflects that, “previously antiwar, at thirty-nine his new concern was privacy. . . . He feared government control of information and identity, and loathed the colonizing forces of big business” (16). In this manner, The Cookbook Collector situates the viral danger inherent to capitalism, which can “sacrifice people for products, and trade quality for profits” (163). This volatility counteracts more civilized business practices, those that are formulated around human dealings even as they focus on commerce, as in George’s attempt to acquire a prized eighteenth-century cookbook collection from a seller. When George ultimately succeeds in his purchase, he also extends funds to the Redwood League to purchase more land “to

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add to Sequoia National Park” (375), a donation toward preservationist efforts that is wholly antithetical to the corporate mindset evidenced by ISIS and Veritech, the latter an intentional pun on the Latin veritas, which implies that what is being packaged, marketed, and sold is not merely a product but an ideology and a “true” one at that. George’s gift consecrates a more ethical turn in his behavior. Rather than remain insular and self-focused, he redoubles his commitment to both individual and nation in a beneficial rather than exploitative manner. His interests move from those of a self-preservationist to an environmentalist. This duality between an unconscionable and an ethical capitalism forms the basis of one of the premiere tenets for contemporary fiction. Assessing twenty-first-century fiction, Peter Boxall argues that “if there is an ethical turn in the fiction of the new century, then one place in which the struggle toward a new ethics can be found is in this construction of a new and delicate narrative identity, a new mind with which we might think a contemporary global condition, just as the political momentum is towards tribal, oppositional thinking” (141). Goodman’s novel highlights precisely Boxall’s progression from a tribal capitalism toward a more communal endeavor. As corporations focus on the ascendance of government-funded projects concerning data surveillance and electronic fingerprinting, schemes that privilege a predatory, colonizing spirit while maintaining an invasive anonymity over the public, The Cookbook Collector also offers an alternative. Goodman’s text situates how archival cookbooks and Emily’s ultimate Geno.type project—a business venture focused on circulating one’s lived history across continents to distant family—act as experiential history, distributing legacy down to the future generations and operating as not just collecting but as active engagement with one’s legacy. Goodman’s novel, that is, asserts that an understanding of ancestry and identity yields a compassionate world perspective; in turn, the importance of ancestry and progeny in Jewish theology cannot be understated. The Cookbook Collector distinguishes between cultural tradition and individualistic selfhood. Those in Jonathan’s corporation, ISIS, plan to continue the tradition of economic exploitation practiced by many of the industry forbearers, and only Orion, one of the computer programmers and chief architect of the software, voices opposition. Emily and Orion are the two business-savvy characters who most assume an individualistic stance. As a result, they are the ones who most emphatically stand apart from the monolithic enterprise of global capitalism. As their security software company grows, Orion espouses admiration for the philosophical stance of “maverick free-software activist Richard Stallman” in interviews (134, italics in original). Orion’s appreciation for the free circulation of ideas speaks to his egalitarian ideal, but that ideal also stands out in sharp contrast with Jonathan. Jonathan wants to colonize all markets for his corporate gain; to Jonathan, “information was currency” (115). In this

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respect, the novel indicts the exploitative potential inherent to capitalism, a many-tiered enterprise that undermines free exchange whenever individuals like Jonathan think they can profit from corporate control over it. Jonathan monopolizes information flow to better enhance his wealth and prey on a culture of fear. He is also powerful enough in the company to silence Orion when he speaks out of turn. Jonathan’s traditional capitalistic sensibility causes him to appropriate a project that Emily’s team has been designing for their data-storage company. In a moment of intimacy, Emily reveals to Jonathan a design, via electronic fingerprinting spyware, for systematically recording individual online movement, which would be recorded in “forensic” detail (48). Although Emily hesitates on the design as she and her company reconcile themselves to the fact of its central illegality, Jonathan moves forward, unbeknownst to Emily, with a prototype. As ISIS stock sinks amid the receding of the technology bubble, Jonathan heads to Los Angeles for a job fair. Significantly, he is on American Flight 11, which crashes into the North Tower on September 11. As ISIS employees discover this news, they make his last project available to the highest bidder; in this case, they approach the U.S. government. Orion is aghast at such political misuse and vocalizes his fears, “Our new customer is the Bush administration? . . . You do see what this means. Loss of privacy, loss of civil liberties. . . . The Feds could access e-mail, and search everyone’s transactions—and we’d be the instrument” (341). 3 The other business partners of ISIS, however, remain indifferent to the executive ways in which their product will be used politically. Because their national sense of exceptionalism has been shaken by the terrorist attack, they are filled with vengeance and seek to best profit from the exploitative spyware. Therefore, The Cookbook Collector reveals the contradictory attitudes of corporate profit and public concern as corporate CEOs prioritize profiting from military and governmental campaigns over the public good. The CEOs do not reflect on the fact that they are selling a software device that will derail civil liberties. Instead, they support the national fantasy of security as an endgame regardless of the ethical quagmire. This financial decision expertly reflects the political reality of American bureaucracy, where the transparency of exploitation is an old tradition seconded by capitalism. Yet, with regard to the novel as well as historical reality, interrogating, if not deconstructing, this defense of the U.S. national fantasy is of the utmost importance if the legacy of democracy is to be revered. The positions that Orion and Jonathan hold contain clear ideological value. Within a post-9/11 context, the activist Orion finds himself marginalized, gagged, and effectively exiled by a stronghold of ISIS staffers who pay tribute to the horror of Jonathan’s death by pushing through business ventures. In this way, Orion becomes a mirror of his father. When Orion’s father, the poet Lou Steiner, later reads aloud a poem at Jonathan’s memorial service, he substitutes a radicalist poem written in

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the wake of the political fallout from Vietnam for the originally planned sweet villanelle, and the audience “squirmed and whispered” at this intertwining of the political and personal (353). Any opposition to, and certainly any outright interrogation of, the policies instituted in the wake of 9/11 are collectively censured and viewed as heretical by a public inculcated to question political resistance. Lou’s appropriation of this space to advance political activism goes against the state fantasy that authorizes and regulates American exceptionalism. Jonathan, meanwhile, is lauded as the misunderstood genius, a militant if ultimately sympathetic figure who Emily alone knows betrayed the boundaries of personal trust to gain a corporate advantage. Her traumatized, internal indictment of Jonathan’s duplicity, “How could you?” (353), serves as a refrain that refracts outward, symbolically leveling itself equally against the American bureaucrats and policymakers who wield this reprobate power. Thus, even as The Cookbook Collector analyzes the “sentimental education” (Gray 134) of personal experience, it also underscores the relevance of those same concerns on the political realm. Personal suffering, that is, cannot be divided from national politics easily, and those who circulate political dissent are themselves spurned of their former prominence. The progression from a technological product that protects the individual to one that assists the government in spying also accurately reflects the business practices instituted after the terrorist attacks on September 11. Such profiteering is rewarded. As The Cookbook Collector narrates, “Harvard Business School students studied the successful evolution of the ISIS business model from a focus on Internet security to Internet surveillance, and its shift from servicing small businesses to winning government contracts” (384). Against this model of corporate profit lies a second, starker reality; the discretion that Emily’s company established toward surveillance directly leads to their dwindling IPO numbers. In this manner, Goodman’s novel reveals how the ethical lapses in American business policy are compensated monetarily insofar as they relate to post-9/11 concerns of war security. All demonstrations of individual regret or hesitation, as Emily’s and Orion’s attitudes make clear, are overridden by traditional proponents of capitalism. The subsequent War on Terror authorizes the dismissal of ethics since the window of opportunity to profit from such geopolitical ventures is limited. In turn, individualistic Orion and Emily both abandon their posts as cofounders of their respective companies, understanding that the capitalistic conditions of enterprise have polluted the dream they once had of aiding society. Emily’s reaction to the terrorist attacks also reveals a contradictory attitude toward 9/11, one which, like first wave post-9/11 literature, seeks to turn a blind eye to the attack and insist on the country’s invincibility even as it highlights how impossible the project of American exceptionalism has become. In the moments after learning of the terrorist attack,

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Emily “recalled the day before, the night before, the moment before she turned on the radio. She worked her way backward, from banana slicing to pouring milk, to taking out the cereal box. She was nothing if not disciplined, and she kept to her task, tracing white leaves [on her comforter] with her finger, working her way backward through time, as though she could repair the breaking news” (333). In this national fantasy, the atrocity of 9/11 would be avoided and America’s ideological innocence would be restored. This idea of rewinding national history can also be found in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), and much post-9/ 11 literature likewise employs this language, whether through direct metaphor or through aesthetic techniques that rupture the continuities of narrative time. However, The Cookbook Collector refuses to close on this narrative conceit of American exceptionalism, unlike narratives such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), which closes by rewinding the events of the terrorist attack and those who fell from the Twin Towers and consequently concludes that America “would have been safe” (326). While the interest in heritage and lineage in Extremely Loud corresponds with what Goodman’s novel elsewhere encourages, it is the placement of Foer’s particular scene that renders it antithetical. Rather than close by affixing meaning to the regulatory fantasy of national invincibility, Emily copes with reality and complicates the agenda of war security. Since Emily had already exhibited misgivings about the invasive system of surveillance technology, she actively resists the traditional corporate logic and instead launches a countermeasure. However, that countermeasure is grounded in a recovery of the tradition of ethnic heritage. In contrast to the problematic legacy of the PATRIOT Act and similar governmental practices, which prioritize national security above ethical morality, Emily endeavors to enable citizens to define and support themselves apart from the political machine. Emily’s decision diverges from Orion’s. Whereas he embraces the abandonment of all family and social systems, disengaging from both his longtime girlfriend and any meaningful social context, and thereby pursues a politically blind existence par excellence, Emily recommits herself to opposing the institutionalized practice of predatory security. Emily reprioritizes the value of family and begins developing a new online site, Geno.type, which would “leverage the Internet to reconnect long-lost friends and relatives” (393). The site equally leverages against the invasive abuses of the PATRIOT Act and its means of surveillance, rewarding community and openness rather than secrecy, individual exchange rather than political governance. Nonetheless, Emily is conscious that she cannot merely rewind the harm that her intimacy with Jonathan caused, visà-vis the production of spyware security; rather, she attempts to offer in recompense a forum of public enterprise and exchange. In doing so, Emily vocalizes her public concern and mobilizes an online social-networking site in contradistinction to spyware. While Emily’s maneuver does

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not foresee how the voluntary giving up of personal information can be just as exploitative, vis-à-vis Facebook’s actual practices, she believes in the positive activism implicit in the Internet. Emily’s casts the Internet as an agent of transformative change that can occupy and reconstruct civil discourse, organizing an insurgence of domestic resistance. The public concern with the PATRIOT Act and the contingent Internet technologies mobilized in the name of national security offer a counterlegacy. For example, Donald Pease suggests that “historical and political crises of the magnitude of 9/11 are always accompanied by mythologies that attempt to reconfigure them within frames of reference that would generate imaginary resolution to these crises” (156). One of the many attempts to imagine a resolution to national terror is the implementation of strategic governmental acts to monitor potential terrorist activity. For Pease, though, this implementing only raises the level of American exceptionalism, where citizens will regain their sense of invincibility if they will only hand off absolute power to the government to protect them. Pease naturally warns against this precedent, but The Cookbook Collector also participates in this political discussion, chronicling how Internet companies that develop these forms of spyware are then beholden to bureaucratic administrations and their “mercenary purposes” (342). The independence of political resistance becomes sublimated in the act of ensuring, or imagining that one is ensuring, the safety of American society. The Cookbook Collector suggests new frontiers for the post-9/11 novel because its focus is decidedly less on 9/11 and more about post-9/11 society. In other words, it does not merely catalog the minute horror that unfolded in the hours and days after September 11, 2001, so much as it considers the geopolitical ramifications of the atrocity. In turn, the ethnic themes and structures of Goodman’s former novels find new angles of critical inquiry. For example, Maya Socolovsky contends that Goodman’s work typically “situates the framework of orthodoxy within the larger mythically limitless space of America, suggesting that the negotiation of a post-assimilationist stance entails a conscious and careful movement between the legacies and structures that each has to offer” (“Land, Legacy, and Return” 42). In The Cookbook Collector, however, the legacies and structures of traditional corporate orthodoxy are juxtaposed against an obstinate individualism that questions when profit and politics override public safety. While both Orion and Emily refuse to assimilate into the larger cultural context, only Emily is able to build a counter–frame of reference. Significantly, her site advocates for a recovery, if not active renewal, of ethnic identity, which promises to bridge the gap between cultural perspectives. Geno.type exists as a limitless conduit between once-distant familial relations; Geno.type is a conduit that connects formerly lost people together in a circulation of trans-spatial confidences

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and homecomings, and it is in this act that cultural resistance reveals itself. Goodman’s novel concludes with Jess marrying George in a Jewish wedding ceremony presided over by Rabbi Helfgott, a movement that could be regarded as a retreat back into the prescripts of a sentimental education. However, The Cookbook Collector does not gloss over the trauma that individuals have suffered. The text’s closing lines locate the continuum between present continuity and future dislocation, for “the house was quiet. Their friends were gone. The scent of roses, wedding music, and laughter faded away. The hammock swayed under them, and George and Jess floated together, although nothing lasted. They held each other, although nothing stayed” (394). This balance interweaves together a rhetorical poetics that testifies to the seismic fracture America endured while revealing unease over the mythos of either national or personal exceptionalism. This transparency is evident even as Jess and George bind themselves together anew via a shared cultural experience. Victoria Aarons comments that “contemporary America is anxiously figured in Goodman’s fiction as a pernicious influence on Jewish identity, hard-won only to be threatened by the vagaries of American culture and its attendant sense of isolation, disjuncture, and displacement” (25). Yet The Cookbook Collector celebrates an embrace of contemporary, albeit marginalized, culture. Jess and, specifically, George are model characters who, while emerging from the excesses of capitalism, thrive on a commitment to activism and learnedness, handsomely repaying the Rabbi’s loan to Jess and allowing the Rabbi to build a new Canaan, with its attendant religious symbolism. Jess and George’s adoption of activism and environmentalism transfigure, to use Aarons’s rhetoric, their pernicious ties to a hard-line capitalism and embed them within a continuum of cultural reformation. The Cookbook Collector similarly celebrates Emily’s use of contemporary technology as a countermeasure against the malignant purposes of online surveillance, where she promises to bridge disconnected families, including her own, and unite them. Ezra Cappell argues that Goodman’s fiction “eloquently voices the perils of unfettered assimilation, the withering of roots[,] and the loss of memory that is often attendant with pursuing the American dream” (148). Even though she does not, as Jess does, end the novel subscribing to Jewish spirituality, Emily’s emphasis on reconstructing familial communication combats the boundaries formed by a generation of American assimilation. In doing so, Goodman’s novel analyzes how Emily and Jess Bach, using different modes of cultural resistance, deny the cataleptic conditions of their capitalistic brethren and instead countermand those values in favor of cultural identity. The roots of the Bach’s familial estrangement that originated from her mother’s lack of orthodoxy can be repaired. In turn, the space of

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homecoming can be recalibrated and imagined apart from a physical location as it records a competing perspective and resolution. As a result, Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector not only addresses the solipsistic cultural mentality that prevailed before the terrorist attacks, but also it chronicles the seismic shift that ordains post-9/11 American reality. The security protection developed by online corporation moves away from protecting individuals and instead toward enabling constant and unmitigated surveillance by governmental officialdom. As the American public began to stop looking at television coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attack, so too had “obituaries and memorial services [] tapered off, and flags were smaller where they still stood. Magazines showcased 9/11 widows, and their families, especially the babies their husbands would never know, but those same publications featured recipes for easy, breezy outdoor fun” (383). This cultural shift not only records the withdrawal of the need to memorialize, but it also hints toward a more active and openly resistant attitude toward the policies instituted thereafter. Consequently, The Cookbook Collector not only records the immediate need by both corporate CEOs and government policy makers to unilaterally push for more surveillance to guarantee our safety and exceptionalism, but it also co-opts the public concern over the War on Terror to suggest different ways to quell the crisis, including through archival and online cultural exchange. Ultimately, then, Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector records the corporate and political misuse of technology in light of 9/11 and national security and suggests alternatives. Goodman’s novel exists as a narrative frame of reference, an advocacy against online surveillance and the fraudulent measures of nationalism regulated equally by bureaucracies of capitalism and the government. In Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Boxall suggests that “the need to imagine newly bound bodies that can bear moral responsibility, that can function as democratic, sovereign subjects under newly disarticulated global conditions, is balanced against an opposite need to open bodies up” and produce “forms of being that can close cultural division rather than widen it” (160). In The Cookbook Collector, Jess’s embrace of her Jewish identity at her wedding and Emily’s use of digital networks that certify the importance of ancestry are but two exemplars of this new literary tradition. While Geno.type may, albeit unintentionally, undercut ancestry with its voluntary sharing of personal data, which can in turn be mined by governmental and corporate agencies, one’s relationship to ancestry is not a static thing that can be accessed in any or all particular ways but a dynamic reality that can be cultivated in particular ways. Through its depiction of rare and aged literary texts, historical cookbooks, and, later, digital archives, Goodman’s text prioritizes those artifacts that encapsulate ancestry within a continuum of cultural memory and identity. Unlike earlier post-9/11 novels that fetishize national trauma and victimhood,

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Goodman’s novel addresses the solipsistic capitalist mentality that prevailed after the terrorist attacks and radically embraces the regenerative qualities of a homecoming, an ancestral space with networked and transspatial implications. As the American-sponsored War on Terror continues its interminable campaign against fundamentalist extremists, the degree to which Goodman’s novel records the cataclysmic political and bureaucratic misuse of technology in light of post-9/11 national security will only continue to become more powerful and resonant. WORKS CITED Aarons, Victoria. “The Covenant Unraveling: The Pathos of Cultural Loss in Allegra Goodman’s Fiction.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22, no. 3 (2004): 12–25. Print. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print. Cappell, Ezra. American Talmud: The Cultural Work of Jewish American Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Print. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Mariner, 2005. Print. Franzen, Jonathan. Freedom. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Print. Goodman, Allegra. The Cookbook Collector. New York: Dial, 2010. Print. Gray, Richard. “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis.” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (2009): 128–48. Print. Omer-Sherman, Ranen. “Orthodox Community and Individuality in Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls.” Religion and Literature 36, no. 2 (2004): 75–97. Print. Pease, Donald E. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Print. Royal, Derek Parker. “Unfinalized Moments in Jewish American Narrative.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22, no. 3 (2004): 1–11. Print. Socolovsky, Maya. “Land, Legacy, and Return: Negotiating a Post-Assimilationist Stance in Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22, no. 3 (2004): 26–42. Print. ———. “Southern Discomfort: Revisiting the Jewish Question in Tova Mirvis’s The Ladies Auxiliary.” In Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative, edited by Derek Parker Royal, 33–54. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011. Print.

NOTES 1. This name is a reference to the historical Institute for Science and International Security, not the later formation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. 2. Notably, both Franzen’s Freedom and Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector culminate as ecocritical studies on conservationist environmental practices about, respectively, wildlife and nature. 3. Goodman’s novel, it should be noted, was conceived and published before the Edward Snowden file leaks.

NINE “I’m the Motherfucker Who Found This Place” Locating Post–bin Laden America in Zero Dark Thirty Lloyd Isaac Vayo

Though it chronicles the near decade from 9/11 up through the successful raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty is a decidedly post–bin Laden film, existing temporally and ideologically in the aftermath of that pseudo-epochal event. Indeed, though the film does a generally adequate job of chronicling the flawed efforts to find, fix, and finish bin Laden (in Special Forces terminology) over the course of those ten years, including interagency squabbling and al-Qaeda counteroffensives, its primary function is to validate the efforts expended to kill bin Laden and to treat his death as an endpoint to the 9/11 era. Perhaps the most noteworthy and discussed aspect of this validation is the film’s tacit approval for the “enhanced interrogation” methods used in CIA black sites to acquire information vital to the successful tracking of bin Laden’s courier. 1 Throughout the film, numerous scenes depicting detainee torture, specifically torture that generates productive intelligence, are included, suggesting torture as a measured and largely helpful method of ensuring national security, rather than the detrimental phenomenon that it has proven to be. Later in the film, characters refer wistfully to the Bush era and its more permissive attitude toward torture when faced with the slightly stronger limits imposed by Obama. In addition to the treatment of torture, the film’s version of the raid itself leaves much to be desired, trading filmic tension for accuracy in a 105

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manner that accords with revisionist treatments of the mission’s intent. As per accounts of Seal Team Six members involved in the raid, including Matt Bissonnette’s No Easy Day and the article “The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden . . . Is Screwed,” attributed to “the Shooter,” much of what occurs in the film version of the raid is inaccurate, from the verbal communications between the members to the contested nature of whether the mission was intended to capture or kill bin Laden. In the absence of official narrativity due to the classified nature of the raid and its preparation, the viewer relies upon the film version to fix the raid’s details, 2 thereby also requiring, or at least requesting, a degree of veracity in that narrative. That the film elides some of the raid is to be expected, if only for expediency; however, the consequences of that expediency problematize its reliability as a document. Finally, the conclusion of the film neglects the ongoing presence of post-9/11 narrativity in contemporary political culture, particularly in the form of ongoing USA PATRIOT Act provisions (primarily surveillance and the National Defense Authorization Act) and increased drone-strike activity, ending abruptly after bin Laden’s death is confirmed by protagonist Maya, played by Jessica Chastain. Though not directly stated as such, the film suggests that, after bin Laden’s death, 9/11 is a closed book, rather than a finished chapter in a much longer work within the volumes of the War on Terror. Had the film not ended shortly after bin Laden’s demise, or had it reflected the ongoing nature of the conflict, that Ayman al-Zawahiri would take bin Laden’s place at the head of al-Qaeda and that opposition would continue, this apparent closure would not be so present; in the absence of the idea that business as usual would go on, that closure is more starkly presented. Following on Bigelow’s relatively nuanced 2008 film The Hurt Locker, one might have expected Zero Dark Thirty to move beyond American exceptionalism to incorporate a more international perspective, and the film does make strides in that direction, showing the thorny nature of ethics in the intelligence world, as well as the rampant unpopularity of U.S. efforts in many areas of the globe. Yet, in a number of slippery moments, in attempting to be gritty and avoid the exceptionalist trap, Zero Dark Thirty fails to successfully distance itself from the problems that it intends to critique. Before turning to an analysis of these three areas of particular interest in the film’s representation of the run-up to and commission of the bin Laden raid (torture, the raid itself, and the sense of closure posited by the film), it is worthwhile to pause for a moment to examine the essentials of the film itself as a means of establishing its scope, which will serve as a guide for the overall analysis. Opening with a series of overlapping recordings played over the title “September 11, 2001,” Zero Dark Thirty begins with the event that spurs all that follows, 9/11, while also pointing to the cacophonous swell of extant narratives and implying an ability to

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simplify that static. From there, Bigelow (and screenwriter Mark Boal, who also worked with Bigelow on The Hurt Locker) takes the viewer through a survey of the intelligence efforts that follow during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as gathering efforts in undeclared battlefields worldwide. Though primarily geared toward gleaning information about forthcoming attacks (seen in the film in the form of attacks on tourists in Saudi Arabia and the London bombings, among others), a consistent thread throughout is the search for bin Laden, recently escaped from the caves around Tora Bora in late 2001 and now in an undisclosed location, theorized to be in the tribal areas straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The timeline, though chronological, is relatively haphazard: major events are included (important interrogations, decisions at the CIA, attacks executed and foiled), and a sense is given of the relative mundanity of day-to-day efforts to track bin Laden, but much is left out or skipped over, leaving the viewer to fill in the gaps and/or trust that the relevant issues are being adequately covered. Throughout, the film offers escalation, initially in “enhanced interrogation” tactics, then in the drumbeat of intelligence surrounding bin Laden’s whereabouts, from a tangential lead subject to the unflagging attentions of protagonist “Maya,” a CIA agent, to the primary means of tracking and, eventually, killing the al-Qaeda mastermind. Though short of a cinema vérité approach, the film does maintain a veneer of documentary realness, a gritty, uncompromising approach that offers the viewer an unvarnished take that suggests that Bigelow is levelling with the audience, positing a narrative that is more honest than those heretofore on offer. The film is, some might say necessarily, a flawed document (its basis in classified information endowing it with an unavoidably shadowy quality); however, those flaws, in its attitude toward torture, in its depiction of the raid resulting in bin Laden’s death, and in the false sense of closure it offers to the audience, demonstrate the problematic nature of post–bin Laden attitudes toward what was once known as the War on Terror. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Zero Dark Thirty’s rendering of the search for bin Laden, at least in major media discussions, is the film’s attitude toward torture, a perspective that, despite Bigelow’s protestations to the contrary, 3 ends up tacitly validating torture as a productive means of intelligence gathering. The film captures multiple methods of detainee treatment that constitute torture, including numerous instances of beatings, waterboarding, stress positions, subjection to loud music for extended periods of time, and placement in confined spaces (a very small plywood box in this case), among others. Based on the simple frequency with which these methods are used and portrayed throughout the film, Zero Dark Thirty suggests that torture may be considered standard operating procedure in the efforts to gather actionable intelligence on burgeoning plots and bin Laden’s location, less the exception than the rule.

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This torture is less than impromptu as well, seeming to be a relatively finely tuned method with its own designated venues: the numerous anonymous black sites in which detainees are held (the only one specifically named is in Gdansk, Poland). What is also noteworthy about the depiction of torture in the film is its effortless precision; interrogators know just how far to turn the screws to gather usable information, and errors do not exist, or at least are not seen to exist, in the film’s account. No detainees are ever pushed too far; no one is hospitalized, no one dies, there are no bodies to dispose of and no skeletons to closet. As such, torture comes across as at worst a necessary evil, at best a viable form of processing prisoners, being presented without comment, merely as a thing that occurred, a practice that was used, rather than a regrettable chapter of the aftermath of 9/11. If torture is taken as a run-of-the-mill occurrence, as the film suggests it is, then the question becomes whether, or to what degree, torture is an efficacious means of gathering useful information, and Zero Dark Thirty suggests that it is, with a substantial portion of the information surrounding Maya’s main lead, a courier named Abu Ahmed, coming from enhanced interrogations. Relatively early on in the film, as the Abu Ahmed lead begins to develop after a tangential message of him by detainee Ammar (the first victim of on-screen torture), the viewer looks over Maya’s shoulder at a compilation of interrogation footage that seems to attest to torture’s beneficial potential. Image after image shows detainees in various states of duress, which, though not specifically placed in the context of torture, may be construed to be the result of prior or ensuing torture; detainees are shown sparsely clothed, strapped to chairs or to ropes fixed to hooks in the ceiling, their locations unknown but reasonably inferred to be either the black sites shown earlier in the film or possibly other detention areas like Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan or possibly Guantanamo Bay. During a later interrogation sequence, this time at an ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s intelligence organization) prison in Pakistan, the efficacy of torture is underlined in the words of a high-value detainee: “I have no wish to be tortured again. Ask me a question, and I will answer it.” The detainee seems broken but rational, having weighed the calculation of honor versus physical and psychological pain and having decided to comply, and Maya easily gains further confirmation of her Abu Ahmed lead from him, information that, by implication, he would not have provided in such a forthcoming manner prior to his softening up by interrogators. However, in the aftermath of its release, the controversy surrounding the film’s depiction of torture finds some taking issue with torture’s productivity. Indeed, some hold that “torture interrogations were irrelevant to finding Bin Laden . . . [suggesting that] there is a strong case to argue that torture is not part of the story of finding Bin Laden” (“Zero Dark Thirty . . .”). Yet, if one was to watch Zero Dark Thirty, a very different picture would emerge of an espe-

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cially effective regime of torture, one that not only serves as a productive means of intelligence gathering but also, in the manner of its portrayal, puts the audience in the interrogator’s shoes. Zero Dark Thirty’s focus on Maya as its protagonist encourages the audience to identify with her and her struggles to get the intelligence community to take the Abu Ahmed lead seriously, in the process establishing a link between the audience and Maya such that, when she tortures, we torture. In the first torture sequence, when Ammar is being waterboarded by “Dan,” a fellow CIA agent, Dan tells Maya to “grab the bucket . . . put some water in it” and, in the process, renders her complicit in the waterboarding that follows. Though Dan and the other guards have Ammar pinned down, he could not be waterboarded without Maya’s participation, making her an active partner in the proceedings. Yet, at this point, Maya is a reluctant participant; she is there, she helps, but only under direction and not of her own volition or with her own initiative. As the film progresses, Maya takes a more active role in the torture regime, particularly in the case of Abu Faraj, then al-Qaeda’s number three (after bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri). In detention, Maya orders the beating and waterboarding of Faraj, no longer a recipient of torture dictates but instead the one doing the ordering. As an audience, we already identify with Maya; her successes are our successes, her failures our failures. When she is first told by Dan to fill the bucket with water, we share her reluctance and pause; now, when she orders Faraj to be beaten and then waterboarded, we order the same, being drawn into the decision-making process and compromising critical distance. Though Bigelow draws a line between showing torture and telling that it is effective, saying “depiction is not endorsement” (quoted in “Zero Dark Thirty . . .”), through the necessary identification with Maya (the film would not function without a somewhat sympathetic protagonist), the film does indeed endorse torture, and even when censure appears, it is mild and treated as being a regrettable hindrance. Despite its endorsement in the film, Zero Dark Thirty does not offer an unmet stamp of approval for that method of interrogation; though even when censure appears, mostly at the administrative level, it is seen as a hindrance to the dirty work required to generate real, actionable information. When Dan, burnt out by the many interrogations that he has led and the torture that is integral to them, prepares to leave to return to a job in Washington, he warns Maya about the changing landscape and latitude available to the interrogators, cautioning her that “you don’t want to be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes,” suggesting that what was once viable is now no longer so. While decompressing between interrogations, Maya and others gather around a table with a TV in the background, upon which the viewer sees President Obama stating with his trademark surety that “America doesn’t torture.” If it was not apparent before, now, at the highest levels of government, in

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a seat once held by the somewhat more torture-friendly George W. Bush, there is confirmation that torture will no longer be tolerated (at least not in the high-profile, open-secret manner it was during the Bush administration). Another character, known only as “the Wolf,” a highly placed administration figure who happens to be a practicing Muslim and a fervent supporter of Maya, remarks that “Abu Ghraib and Gitmo fucked us,” pointing to more visible and widely indicted instances of torture and, by implication, saying that previous excesses have handcuffed the CIA from doing the work that it needs to do to be effective. Finally, in the late deliberations over the coalescing bin Laden raid, when calls are made for more certain knowledge of bin Laden’s presence in the targeted compound, a meeting participant counters that “you know we lost the ability to prove that when we lost the detainee program,” the detainee program being the only way to acquire proof and leaving speculation and guesswork as the only possibilities in its absence. Much like the portrayal of torture in the film, Zero Dark Thirty’s rendering of the raid resulting in bin Laden’s death is similarly fraught with vague inaccuracies that speak to a deliberate manipulation of details for dramatic, as well as ideological, effect. 4 In the course of the raid, as reenacted in the film, members of Seal Team Six, the infamous squad responsible for bin Laden’s death, are seen and heard to communicate with each other aloud, signaling movements, attempting to coax out residents of the compound, and clearing spaces for entering contested doorways, calling “breacher!” to signal the placement of an explosive charge. The unidentified team member whose story makes up “The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden . . . Is Screwed,” known only as “the Shooter,” takes substantial issue with this version of events, asserting a firm command over and lack of necessity for direct interaction: “Team members didn’t need much communication, or any orders, once they were on line. We’re reading each other every second. We’ve gotten so good at war, we didn’t need anything more” (Bronstein 19). Rather, the only communication that the Shooter notes in his account is internal: “Instead of counting, for some reason I said to myself the George Bush 9/11 quote: ‘Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended’” (14). As for the “breacher!” call in the film, the Shooter’s reaction speaks for itself: “Are you fucking kidding me? Shut up!” (29). The Shooter’s anger at this misrepresentation supports the action-movie nature of Zero Dark Thirty, spectacle taking precedence over reality, a phenomenon also present in the moment where news of bin Laden’s death is passed to leadership. One of the most iconic moments of the raid is the transmission from the Seals to their leadership back in Afghanistan that the mission has been accomplished and that, as per their initial identification, bin Laden is dead, though the larger context of that call, as well as its specifics, demonstrate the fungible nature of Zero Dark Thirty’s account of the raid.

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Under the pen name Mark Owen, Seal Team Six member Matt Bissonnette gives his version of the raid in No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden, weighing in first on the nature of the raid itself, as offered in a pre-raid briefing: “Toward the end, a question was raised about whether or not this was a kill mission. The lawyer from either the Department of Defense or the White House made it clear this wasn’t an assassination” (177). While this advisement suggests that the raid was not intended to kill bin Laden, and that capture was a real possibility, the specifics of the raid itself say otherwise: indeed, as bin Laden is encountered, no effort is made to capture him, possibly due to circumstances (the potential that he is armed or wearing a suicide vest) or due to a discarding of that pretense in the key moment. After the death of the man that the Seals take to be bin Laden, confirmation is still required, on the chance that bin Laden had been using a double, and another key moment in the film is Maya’s bittersweet identification of the man she has sought for so long, the different permutations on offer in the film, from the Shooter, and from Owen creating instability within the narrative. Zero Dark Thirty shows Maya, eerily calm within the hubbub of Seals disgorging gathered intelligence information, approaching the body bag, unzipping it far enough to see bin Laden’s face (though the audience is not given the same opportunity), and wordlessly nodding to a Seal commander on the phone with Washington. Somewhat differently, the Shooter’s take on the identification finds Maya more emotional: “While they were still checking the body, I brought the agency woman over. I still had all my stuff on. We looked down and I asked, ‘Is that your guy?’ She was crying” (Bronstein 24). Here, Maya’s steely resolve is exchanged for a more stereotypically feminine emotionality, and her interaction with the body is shepherded by a Seal, rather than a solo run. In Owen’s version, the Maya character, known as Jen in his version, does not even view the body from up close: “Back in the hangar, Jen stayed on the perimeter of the crowd. She didn’t say anything, but I knew from her reaction she could see Bin Laden’s body on the floor. With tears rolling down her cheeks, I could tell it was taking a while for Jen to process” (267). Again, Maya/Jen is emotional but in this case cannot even bring herself to look at the body. The film’s stronger protagonist, possibly included as a compelling character and/or a tale of the struggle of female agents in a largely male environment, is nowhere to be found in the Shooter and Owen’s versions; Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya fulfills the audience’s need for a hero narrative, and an underdog to boot, though the Shooter might be an equally plausible hero. Other than Maya’s confirmation of bin Laden’s death upon viewing the body, the culminating moment of the film is not only the raid itself but also the kill shot(s) that take out bin Laden, which are paradoxically downplayed in the film but which receive greater attention elsewhere. In the film, the shots pass by in an instant; as Seals approach a room on the

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third floor of the compound, believed to be bin Laden’s space, a form flashes through a doorway, and the lead Seal snaps off several shots, knocking the figure from its feet. Upon entry into the room, the Seal following behind puts three further shots into the body, after which preliminary confirmation of its identity is gathered from others in the room (one of bin Laden’s wives and a handful of children). Perhaps in the name of realism, the shots are almost anticlimactic, a blur only significant after the fact. The Shooter’s account is, understandably, more detailed: “He’s got a gun within reach. He’s a threat. I need to get a head shot so he won’t have a chance to clack himself off [blow himself up]. In that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! The second time as he’s going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again” (Bronstein 21). Yet, Owen’s version is somewhat different, particularly on the matter of bin Laden-as-threat: “He hadn’t even prepared a defense. He had no intention of fighting . . . bin Laden knew we were coming when he heard the helicopter. . . . There is no honor in sending people to die for something you won’t even fight for yourself” (249). Zero Dark Thirty gives no sense of threat; the audience sees bin Laden’s wife, but no vest or weapon; the Shooter gives us nothing but threat, perhaps as a vindication of the kill shots; Owen gives us a surprising lack of threat and passes judgment on that account. In this instance, the film’s differing account offers both complexity (were the kill shots necessary, or could bin Laden have been captured?) and exoneration (it all happened so fast . . .), a slight but notable disjunction that is among the many issues the Shooter takes with the film. The Shooter, along with Owen/Bissonnette, are the only witness-participants who have gone on the record about the specifics of the raid, and the Shooter takes notable exception to a number of incidents in the film, pointing to troubling inaccuracies that qualify its validity as anything other than a dramatized rendering of events. Bronstein notes that “he [the Shooter] laughs at the beginning of the film about the bin Laden hunt when the screen reads, ‘Based on firsthand accounts of actual events’” (29), implying some distance between the filmic version and the reality that the Shooter experiences himself. As for entertainment value, the Shooter confirms that “it was fun to watch. There was just little stuff” (29), positing that only a specialized audience might find problems in the raid itself, as he does. Indeed, the Shooter asserts that “the tactics on the screen ‘sucked,’ he says, and ‘the mission in the damn movie took way too long’ compared to the actual event” (29), in which the raid itself makes up nearly a third of the running time. Also, the initial identification of bin Laden is given a more genteel treatment in the film, as per the Shooter’s opinion: “When Osama went down, it was chaos, people screaming. No one called his name” (29). Each of these objections, though comparatively minor, combine to cast substantial doubt on the film version of the raid. Even the kill shots, potentially one of the more realistic

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aspects of the film, are downplayed somewhat, the chaos after being muted. In any case, the closure provided in this moment, the chaos of the post-9/11 hunt dissolving into a calm afterglow, is indicative of a larger trend toward closure in the film itself. As the film comes to a close, the audience is led to believe that so too does the search for bin Laden (naturally) and the world of turmoil unleashed by 9/11; we are, Zero Dark Thirty suggests, in a post-post-9/11 era. Steve Coll, noted terrorist researcher and author of such essential texts as Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004) and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2009), makes the claim that, by opening with a black screen and documentary 9/11 audio, “Zero Dark Thirty makes two choices: it aligns its methods with those of journalists and historians, and it appropriates as drama what remains the most undigested trauma in American national life during the last several decades” (1). With this move toward the journalistic, the film establishes for itself a foundation of certitude, as well as a validation of its own authority to offer closure: if Zero Dark Thirty offers facts, then its account and accompanying closure cannot help but be factual. Yet, the film is not the only documentary effort to claim that factual credibility. Bronstein’s “The Man Who . . .” piece contends that “the Shooter’s is the most definitive account of those crucial few seconds, and his account, corroborated by multiple sources, establishes him as the last man to see Osama bin Laden alive” (3). Some combination of the two texts may offer the audience a full accounting of the bin Laden raid specifically and the intelligence gathering that leads to it though, as the Shooter finds mostly smaller errors in the film, its pseudo-factual authority remains largely intact. In fact, Maya’s certainty becomes the film’s own; when in the room as the decision is being made whether to go to the president to recommend a raid, while others waffle, Maya asserts “100 percent he’s there,” a steadfast belief in her own lead recalled by the Shooter as well: “One hundred percent he’s on the third floor. So get to there if you can” (Bronstein 11). Despite its previously documented issues with narrative elisions and omissions, then, the film manages to present a compelling, if not wholly accurate, act of closure, bin Laden’s closing eyes meeting with the closing gate of the C-130 that takes Maya to parts unknown to her own eyes, streaked with tears, then a black screen. However, whether this closure is reliable remains to be seen. Given that it is the result of a creative enterprise, it is not especially surprising that the film should make certain efficient moves in the name of storytelling (composite characters, indistinct timeline, etc.), moves that undermine its sense of authority by emphasizing the film as a constructed document. In the first torture scene with Ammar, after Dan leaves the room, Ammar pleads with Maya for help, and somewhat surprising given her early discomfort with torture methods, she tells him

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that “you can help yourself by being truthful,” and this seems to be the message that the audience is to take away from the film as well. By confronting the nastier aspects of the War on Terror, including the torture depicted in the film, we may, as a nation, help ourselves heal not only the wounds made by Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the black sites but also those still fresh wounds opened by 9/11 itself. The truth will set us free and will also serve as a suture to expedite healing. Coll again finds the indistinct nature of storytelling problematic, saying that “the filmmakers cannot, on the one hand, claim credibility as journalists while, on the other, citing art as an excuse for shoddy reporting about a subject as important as whether torture had a vital part in the search for bin Laden” (1). By setting itself out as a documentary effort, the film establishes a high standard that it fails to meet, using artistic license as a shield to smooth over narrative rough spots. After closure, after an event has been appropriately dealt with, its victim, its witness, its participant may move on to bigger and better things, and such is the case with Zero Dark Thirty as well, its closure allowing the audience to move away from the uneasy ethical atmosphere surrounding torture and into the welcoming arms of Barack Obama. Writing for al Jazeera, Ramzi Kassem, associate professor of law at the City University of New York, suggests that “both the film and the controversy it has ignited treat torture at secret CIA prisons as though it were a thing of the past, masking the reality of an enduring practice” (1). As himself a representative for some individuals held at Guantanamo Bay and at Bagram in Afghanistan, Kassem is in a position to know that torture is far from a closed matter, though it may be closed off from the public eye. Torture appears early and often in the film, but is absent by the film’s conclusion, further underlining the supposed success of Obama’s assertions against U.S. use of torture methods. For Obama, the film then serves a double purpose; first, it functions as support for his contention that the United States is not a state that tortures, at least under his watch, creating additional daylight between his administration and that of his predecessor; and second, the film “amounted to a reelection ad for President Obama” (Miller 1), highlighting his most tangible success during his first term and again branding him a preferable option to the series of failures that marked much of the Bush administration, particularly his second term in office. Zero Dark Thirty is perceived as so pro-Obama, though unintentionally, that its release is delayed by the controversy, and its ability to wrap up 9/11 and put a cherry on top further forwards the notion of moving on from the event. Torture and President Bush are firmly in the rearview mirror, with only clear skies ahead (though skies thick with drones); once the celebration at the World Trade Center site and around the White House, spurred by news of bin Laden’s death, dies down, 9/11 is no more. The question then becomes: now what?

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Two passing moments in the film point to this uncertain future, the post-post-9/11 world, designating it, in its uncertainty, not so much as closure but as a new opening, a different maelstrom much like the one that preceded it. While attempting to pin down the Abu Ahmed lead, Dan, in conversation with the head of the CIA station in Islamabad over what information is yet needed to render the lead actionable, states, “We don’t know what we don’t know. . . . It’s a tautology.” As opposed to the certainty offered by Maya’s conviction about bin Laden’s whereabouts and the film’s assertion that torture is behind us, Dan’s statement reminds the audience that there is much that remains unknown, well beyond the circumscribed space of the torture debate. A new threat may exist, a new plot could well be in the works, and we could be none the wiser. To say that 9/11 is behind us is a debatable, but possibly arguable, contention; to say that the larger sphere of terrorism is behind us is a less valid statement. The film’s close offers the next moment of interest; after identifying bin Laden’s body, we see Maya boarding a C-130 transport plane, her importance reflected by the fact that she is the only passenger on the manifest, and she is asked by a crew member, “Where do you want to go?” Maya does not, or is not given a chance to, answer; she remains in her seat, closes her eyes, and allows tears to overcome her, a rare show of emotion from the generally impassive agent. The question put to Maya is a question for the audience as well: where do we go after 9/11? Is the threat behind us, and can we then turn our attention to other matters, or does the War on Terror roll on, with additional battles to be met? In opposition to the notion of closure, the question remains open, and instead of placing a seal upon the emotional outpouring created by 9/ 11 and its aftermath, be it the victims of the event itself or of the wars that follow, it is only after 9/11 is closed with bin Laden’s death that Maya’s emotion is loosed, problematizing that closure. In the absence of this closure, what does a post–bin Laden America look like? It is certainly a place where hero narratives remain intact; though the Shooter is not really given his day in the sun, security concerns and the codes against self-glorification within the Seal community keeping him anonymous, Maya emerges as a hero, her individual conviction and brio driving the story and pushing the search for bin Laden to its culmination. It is also a place where narrative slippage is largely given a pass in the name of that heroic narrativity, the dissonances between Zero Dark Thirty and its verifiable factual basis not being sufficient to undermine its success as a film, if not as a truthful rendering of the preparation for and execution of the raid. Justice is done (though not in a legal sense, tribunals still pending for key detainees at Guantanamo), evil is punished (theirs, not ours, torture and other abuses by Special Forces and regular troops remaining controversial but unpenalized), and all is right with the world. This is where the idea of closure comes in; seizing upon the moment of bin Laden’s death, without a particularly charismatic face for al-

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Qaeda (al Zawahiri lacking the pizazz and panache of bin Laden), it is easy to pretend that al-Qaeda is now a nonentity, its threat diminished, if not erased, and the time is nigh to move on to other matters. Terror may remain in the background, may be used as a pretense for questionable legislation (the National Defense Authorization Act) and appropriations (the bloated defense budget), but our minds are freed to roam elsewhere: the latest celebrity foibles, the reemergence of Russia, our old Cold War foe, and the next round of elections. Zero Dark Thirty is, in that sense, utterly compromised, its narrative neatness eliding the messy and incomplete nature of the post-9/11 world, its misleading revisionism putting too fine a point on the torture debate, and its sense of closure deceiving the audience into thinking that 9/11 is behind us. Though not as omnipresent in political rhetoric as it was during the Bush administration, we remain in the 9/11 moment, Bigelow’s efforts notwithstanding. Maya may indeed be the motherfucker who found this place (as she asserts to Leon Panetta, CIA director, during a planning meeting), but just what and where it is that she has found is less clear. WORKS CITED Bigelow, Kathryn. “Kathryn Bigelow Addresses Zero Dark Thirty Torture Criticism.” Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2013. Latimes.com. June 12, 2014. Web. Bronstein, Phil. “The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden . . . Is Screwed.” Esquire, March 2013. Esquire.com. Web. Coll, Steve. “‘Disturbing’ and ‘Misleading.’” New York Review of Books, February 7, 2013. Nybooks.com. March 18, 2014. Web. Kassem, Ramzi. “The Controversy around Zero Dark Thirty: As Misleading as the Film Itself.” Al Jazeera, January 19, 2013. Aljazeera.com. March 18, 2014. Web. Miller, Greg. “In Zero Dark Thirty, She’s the Hero; In Real Life, CIA Agent’s Career Is More Complicated.” Washington Post, December 10, 2012. Washingtonpost.com. March 18, 2014. Web. Owen, Mark. No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden. New York: Dutton, 2012. Print. Zero Dark Thirty. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. 2012. Sony Pictures, 2013. DVD. “Zero Dark Thirty’s Torture Scenes Are Controversial and Historically Dubious.” Guardian Film Blog. January 25, 2013. Theguardian.com. March 18, 2014. Web.

NOTES 1. Though the film does include one prominent moment in which another means of intelligence gathering is shown, the bribing of an informant with a new Lamborghini in exchange for the home phone number of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s mother, this moment exists as a rather isolated incident and is only possible after intelligence about Abu Ahmed’s identity is extracted through more torture-centric methods. 2. The ready, and perhaps also closest, parallel here is Paul Greengrass’s 2006 film United 93, which is similarly concerned with fixing the narrative of a pseudo-heroic moment in the response to 9/11 (albeit much earlier than that seen in Zero Dark Thirty). In both cases, the films meet with audiences attempting to acquire detailed information on the particulars of the events in question, while also ameliorating the larger

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trauma of 9/11 itself, either in the notion that our defensive efforts, though largely unsuccessful, were not entirely for naught or in the belief that, though it may take a while, the United States always gets its man. 3. Perhaps most instructively, Bigelow authored a response to criticism of the film’s depiction of torture in the January 15, 2013, edition of Los Angeles Times, suggesting that “some of the sentiments alternately expressed about the film might be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered these U.S. policies, as opposed to a motion picture that brings the story to the screen. Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time” (Bigelow). 4. It is also worth noting that Maya herself, the ostensible protagonist of the film, is absent from much of the depiction of the raid, appearing only briefly at the operations center overseeing the operation and then upon the team’s return to identify the body. In the meantime, the audience is left with a seemingly less sympathetic narrative, its underdog Maya being placed to the side as a cheerleader of sorts. Yet, of the team members depicted in the film, among the most prominent is Justin, played by Chris Pratt, also responsible for the lovable buffoon Andy on the sitcom Parks and Recreation, here providing comic relief and an entry point into the humanization of the team.

TEN From 24 to Homeland The Shift in America’s Perception of Terrorism Deborah Pless

I can’t tell you what to do. I’ve been wrestling with this one my whole life. I see fifteen people held hostage on a bus, and everything else goes out the window. I will do whatever it takes to save them—and I mean whatever it takes. —Jack Bauer, “Day 7: 7:00a.m.–8:00a.m.” We also have to work through, sort of, the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. —Vice President Dick Cheney

In the years since September 11, 2001, American popular media has gone through a series of shifts in the portrayal of antiterrorism and intelligence agencies. This change is best characterized by the move from simplistic, external-threat narratives such as 24 to more nuanced, darker stories that feature internalized threats to national security, such as Homeland. More than just representing a shift in taste, however, these narrative changes represent the opinions of the American viewing public and how an initial zeal of patriotism has, in the years since the attack, been shifted into a more nuanced and jaded view of both terrorism and the American government itself. These shows still retain an aura of fear and paranoia, now extended from fear of a specific externalized threat to a fear that this threat has infected our friends and neighbors.

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The smash popularity of first 24 and then later Homeland can be seen as a direct representation of their relevance to the cultural consciousness, but it is important to note that the two shows did not overlap in airtime. In fact, the two shows exist in separate cultural moments. The show 24, which aired its first episode only weeks after 9/11, was on the screen from 2001 to 2010, with a resurgence in 2014, and is ideologically linked with the immediate days of post-9/11 paranoia, while Homeland has aired thus far from 2011 to 2014, more clearly linked with the American culture in the wake of several revelations about the role of the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies. Our heroes define us. Jack Bauer and Carrie Mathison seem to be polar opposites, but in fact are facets of the same system, both willing to ignore the rights of American citizens when investigating a possible threat and both ultimately alienated from the government when the antiterror agencies for which they work are gutted and rendered “useless” by increased congressional oversight. The transition from 24 to Homeland represents more than just a move toward more complex filmmaking. It is indicative of a real change in public opinion. In the years since September 11, 2001, the American culture has only grown more paranoid about the threat of Islam, spurred on by Islamophobic narratives like these. In the first episode of 24, Jack Bauer (as played by Kiefer Sutherland) states what would become the show’s theme: You can look the other way once, and it’s no big deal, except it makes it easier for you to compromise the next time, and pretty soon that’s all you’re doing; compromising, because that’s the way you think things are done. You know those guys I busted? You think they were the bad guys? Because they weren’t, they weren’t bad guys, they were just like you and me. Except they compromised . . . once.

He establishes that a strong leader is one who never compromises, whose every action is absolute and without the need for justification. It is in this first episode that Bauer acts decisively to gain information he believes is vital to his mission. He shoots a fellow agent at the Counter Terrorist Unit, George Mason (Xander Berkeley), with a tranquilizer, and proceeds to break into his accounts to gain blackmail material, all while keeping Mason hostage in his office. This happens in the first episode, less than halfway through, and the message is clear: Jack Bauer will do whatever he deems necessary in order to protect America, even going so far as to attack a fellow citizen who is nominally on his side. What is most important here is not that Jack does this, however, but that the narrative supports him. We are shown that his actions were good and right and that the world is safer when Jack Bauer is not held back by petty restrictions like the rule of law. But what makes 24 unique here is not that the protagonist is willing to go to such extreme lengths to protect his country and his family but that the narrative so wholly supports him. He can lie,

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torture, spy, break United States law with impunity, violate the Constitution—and he does. While Jack Bauer pummeled terrorists on the small screen, America experienced a level of patriotic fervor not seen since the Second World War. Critical thinkers from Thomas Friedman to Christopher Hitchens called for stricter censure of potential terrorist elements (read: Muslims and Arab Americans), with Hitchens even going so far as to commend the use of torture and suggest that cluster bombs be used to more effect in Afghanistan, hopefully piercing through the Qur’an and into the heart of the local “terrorists.” At home, while pro-government leanings rose, the number of Americans threatened by people of Arab or Muslim descent also climbed. As Moustafa Bayoumi notes in his book How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?, “In the eyes of some Americans, [Arab Americans] have become collectively known as dangerous outsiders. Bias crimes against Arabs, Muslims, and those assumed to be Arab or Muslim, spiked 1,700 percent in the first six months after September 11 and have never since returned to their pre-2001 levels.” (2) It is not hard to see the correlation. When confronted about the possibility that 24 had done more than shape cultural consciousness but had actually changed public policy, executive producer Howard Gordon, who later produced Homeland, said, “At what point are we loyal and beholden to good storytelling, and at what level do you hold yourself accountable for things like stoking Islamophobia or promoting torture as a policy? There were just certain things that we needed to portray in order to make it feel thrilling—and real, even.” Moreover, pundits on both sides of the aisle recognized the importance of Jack Bauer as an American icon: either noting that we have become a nation of Bauers, ready to destroy everything in the name of misplaced xenophobic zeal, or that “we need men like Jack Bauer to protect us” from our weaker impulses. On April 30, 2004, an article went public in the New Yorker alleging that members of the American military stationed at Abu Ghraib detention center were using torture as a method of interrogation and humiliation. The third season of 24 had nearly ended, and the story cast a new light on the season’s final scene, wherein Jack Bauer—ready to break down after the events of this horrific day—is called on to go back to CTU once more to torture and interrogate a suspect. A realization that Jack Bauer no longer represented a fanciful and exaggerated image of American antiterror efforts colored the remainder of the series. Following this, on October 17, 2004, the New York Times went on to further report on the use of torture for the interrogation of detainees in Guantanamo Bay. The lack of public outcry was noteworthy. We had seen Jack Bauer use torture methods, and while the report that his real-life counterparts also resorted to torture was disturbing, it was justifiable. After all, Jack Bauer is always right. Additionally, on January 17, 2005, when White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, reported that while American military forces

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are bound not to use “cruel and unusual punishment” on detainees, no such directives prevent the use of torture or “enhanced interrogation” by CIA operatives or other employees of antiterror agencies. At this time, the narrative on 24 was shifting. Jack Bauer went from being an integral part of the governmental antiterror system to a rogue outsider, willing and able to do whatever was necessary to protect American interests but notably no longer with governmental support. This suggests two things. First, that Jack Bauer as a representative of the ultimate tool against terror could no longer be associated with a governmental system that was hampered by its own bureaucracy. The more Americans discovered about the true nature of the War on Terror, from drones to U.S. surveillance, the further Jack Bauer was narratively pushed from attachment with a corrupt and seemingly petty governmental system. In the later seasons of the show, the CTU faced congressional ramifications for its use of illegal wiretapping, a move that was criticized by Jack Bauer himself and hailed as an end to the effectiveness of the CTU as an institution. Second, it suggests a growing belief in the American public that antiterror agencies fundamentally cannot be trusted to protect our interests but that concerned individuals can. In early 2010, as “Day Eight” of 24 was airing, Chelsea Manning released documents and video through WikiLeaks that indicted the American military and espionage community: the videos included footage of a 2007 Baghdad airstrike on unarmed civilians as well as war reporters and a film of the 2009 Granai airstrike, which killed approximately one hundred Afghan civilians in the Farah Province. The documents leaked included 28,801 documents regarding terrorists and terrorism, as well as a number of files related to Surveillance Detection Units, which had been used to commit acts of “friendly” espionage on European nations. The intention of this surveillance was to presumably protect American interests and the security of American embassies and consulates, but the effect of these leaks on international relations was deleterious. The show ended with its hero on the run and the history of the American antiterror agency tarnished seemingly beyond repair. While 24 portrayed a world in which its hero could engage in illegal activities and still remain the moral center, Homeland took a more cynical view, refusing to endorse Carrie Mathison as the true hero of the story and instead alternating her story with that of the suspected terrorist, Nicholas Brody. Concentrating on Carrie’s actions as a CIA agent (played by Claire Danes), Homeland began airing in 2011 and featured a serialized plot where Carrie seeks to prove that returning American POW Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) is in fact an agent of al-Qaeda. What markedly distinguishes this series from 24 is the context: as the audience, we were not shown whether or not Carrie was correct in her assertions. The result was that while Carrie engaged in the same actions as Jack Bauer—illegal wiretapping and surveillance, “enhanced interrogation,” entrapment—

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the audience was continually forced to question whether or not she was morally justified in doing so. Because we are not told whether or not Brody is, in fact, an agent of al-Qaeda, we are forced to confront a narrative wherein a CIA agent commits illegal espionage on an American citizen. In episode four of the first season, Carrie, who has now illegally wiretapped and placed surveillance cameras in the Brody home in the hopes of proving Nicholas Brody is a terrorist, is found out by her superior and mentor, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin). When Berenson reprimands her for her actions, saying, “And you still haven’t produced a single lead connecting Sergeant Brody to this or any plot against America,” Carrie responds with her ultimate trump card: “That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” In this show, Carrie has no proof of her allegations, and we as the audience have no real way of knowing if she is correct, but the show makes an argument that her actions are warranted simply by virtue of the possibility that they might be right. This attitude, though different from the one portrayed by Jack Bauer, exhibits the same basic principle: when protecting the nation, security is more valuable than freedom. While Carrie and Jack share a predilection for going above and beyond the call of sane or reasonable action, Carrie, however, is notable for being unsupported by her agency from the very start. At the beginning of the series, she has been recalled from her role as an agent abroad due to an investigation into her actions on an unauthorized mission and now finds herself working as an analyst. When she accuses Brody of treason and proceeds to investigate him, she is acting contrary to orders from her superiors and faces severe consequences for her actions, including, but not limited to, suspension from the CIA, loss in rank, institutionalization, arrest, shock-therapy treatment, and kidnapping. Additionally, the narrative shows that Carrie herself can be misled. Throughout the first season, the audience is unclear as to whether or not Nicholas Brody is a terrorist, while Carrie remains solid in her belief that he is. This belief, however, begins to waver at the end of the season, when it is shown that there is another possible terror suspect. At the same time, Brody is revealed to the audience to have been a terrorist all along, which both supports Carrie in her beliefs but also subverts that support, as she now believes Brody innocent. In short, Carrie lacks the moral certainty that surrounds Jack Bauer, and this lack creates a narrative far more morally complex. It is worth noting at this juncture that while Carrie Mathison is easily compared to Jack Bauer, as some have done, they are not literary equivalents. Rather, Carrie’s counterpart in 24 is actually Nina Myers, the rogue agent acting against the interests of the CTU during “Day One.” Carrie and Nina both share several key character traits: they have both had an affair with a married superior, contributing to the breakup of said superior’s marriage—in Carrie’s case, this is with David Estes, while Nina’s

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affair was with Jack himself—and they both operate as morally ambiguous femme fatale archetypes. Carrie is comfortable using her sexuality to gain information in a way that would be unthinkable of Jack Bauer, and her unorthodox decisions serve to paint her as a rogue, like Nina, rather than a straight shooter like Jack. Jack Bauer actually correlates most strongly to Nicholas Brody, the suspected terrorist. Both are fathers with teenage daughters, both have served their countries faithfully for many years. Both men are prone to cheating on their wives. And both are capable of fanatical action in defense of their chosen ideology. It just so happens that those ideologies are diametrically opposed. The real similarity, however, stems from their position as representatives of the American consciousness. Jack Bauer is a vision of post-9/11 American justice, while Nicholas Brody represents that justice perverted. Both are Caucasian males with light hair and blue eyes, both seek to preserve and protect their families, even in the face of extreme danger, and both men must face the realization that their families might ultimately be safer without them. They even share a vice— heroin—and must undergo withdrawal symptoms within the time of the show. It’s worth noting how much more frightening this made Brody: the “typical America” is the villain. No one is above suspicion. It is this shift, from an external to internal source of threat, that represents the greatest difference between 24 and Homeland. It suggests not a more enlightened worldview as some have suggested, or even a more egalitarian one where anyone can become a threat, but a more paranoid extension of the view proposed by immediate post-9/11 media. While we were originally told to be afraid of those who are different from us (xenophobia), now we are told to be afraid that those who are different from us have infected those who are like us, rendering no one safe and creating a fear not just of outsiders but also of our neighbors and friends (sociophobia). Nicholas Brody’s conversion from wholesome American soldier to Islamic fundamentalist, and possible terrorist, is a blatant play on our fears of contagious ideology, the suggestion that when a virulent form of hate is introduced, as the media has often represented Islam, the American public is immediately susceptible. This interpretation of the source of threat does not lessen the paranoia or intensity present in the culture but rather exacerbates it, suggesting that we are right to be afraid and that we should continue to fear our neighbors as well as our enemies. It is logic like this that justifies the NSA wiretapping scandal of 2013, as well as the hacking of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone by American intelligence. The show also represents a new form of Islamophobia, wherein, before it is revealed that Brody truly is a terrorist threat, it is suggested to the audience that he might have converted to Islam at some point during his seven years of captivity. When we see Brody calmly pull out a prayer

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mat and a ritual bowl for ablutions from a box in his garage and pray to Mecca in the episode “Grace,” we are meant to be frightened by his faith and to take it as a sign of his radicalization. Clearly one cannot be both Muslim and an American patriot, and a white man most certainly cannot openly practice Islam without stating for the world that he is a terrorist. By portraying Brody’s faith in this, and by suggesting that it is purely a result of his Stockholm syndrome or other programming at the hands of noted terrorist Abu Nazir, Homeland implies that no American can have a good reason to choose Islamic faith and that anyone who professes it must be a threat. In short, by demonizing Brody’s faith, the show perpetuates a culture of fear and Islamophobia more insidious than the blatant external threats shown on 24. It is also worrisome that while 24 presents Kim Bauer as its representation of American innocence—innocence always in danger from external threats and constantly being kidnapped or assaulted—Homeland has a similar character, whose fate is even more frightening to the American culture. Brody’s daughter, Dana (Morgan Saylor), is also meant to be representative of American innocence, a fact complicated by her father’s role as the main antagonist of the show and her own place in the narrative. Derided by fans for her understandable depression and frustration with life after seasons two and three—the revelation that her father was a wanted terrorist and the destruction of her home life—Dana’s role in the show was cut down for season four. This lack of sympathy for a character whose reactions to her circumstances were well within the bounds of reason suggests that the American public has rejected Dana’s representation of American goodness, and chosen instead to sympathize with Carrie and Brody, who showcase a far more complex and morally ambiguous view of American morals. The implications of this are twofold. First, sympathy for Carrie and Brody does make sense from a narrative standpoint. They are the two centers of the show and therefore the characters we are most called upon to emotionally invest in. Dana, as an outside character whose story contradicts those of our leads, is in this sense an intruder, and it is easy to dislike her. This reveals a deeper point, however, in that Carrie and Brody, neither of them morally clear characters, are the center of the show. Here, the antagonist has as much weight as the hero, and it is occasionally confusing as to who fills which role. The second implication is cultural, a sense that as an audience and therefore as a culture, we are bored by Dana’s representation of innocence in peril and wish that she would “grow up” and “get over it.” We want Dana to move on, to become more cynical, so that she fits in with the adults of her world—in short, we wish for our representation of American innocence to stop being so innocent all the time. We do not have time for innocence. In 2011, a drone strike killed Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader of al-Qaeda. This case was notable because al-Awlaki was born in the

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United States and was officially a U.S. citizen. His death via drone strike was one of the first known (and publicized) deaths of an American citizen via remote targeting and raised strong questions about the legality of the drone program. What is interesting, however, is that it did not lead to a public outcry against the drone program. When surveyed in February 2013, only 53 percent of Americans were concerned that drone strikes might harm civilians, 31 percent worried that they might not be legal, and a mere 26 percent had reservations about what the drone program might do to America’s perception overseas. In this way, Homeland represents not a shift away from the values espoused on 24 but rather a refinement of those ideas and an intensifying of the fears manifest in them. While 24 featured external villains who were observably Other, Homeland brings the threat closer with a villain who is neither objectively good nor bad and who fits our ideals of American masculinity. In so doing, the show does not eradicate the concepts of useful fear and the need for rogue agents willing to overstep civil liberties in order to protect the nation but rather enforces those ideals. Carrie Mathison is unstable, unreliable, and right. Her actions to chase after Nicholas Brody, unorthodox and illegal though they are, ultimately are proven correct by the narrative and the CIA’s treatment of her in light of this is shown to be, in the eyes of the audience, wrong. Homeland, by emphasizing Brody’s conversion to Islam and the danger he poses, justifies Carrie’s actions and, in so doing, creates a narrative for the American public that demands faith in the actions of antiterror organizations and individuals, while suggesting that to question their methods is tantamount to treason. It is impossible to examine the history of America’s view of its antiterrorism agencies and the shifting understanding of what constitutes a threat to national security in the wake of September 11 without mentioning and understanding the deep-rooted Islamophobia that has influenced both 24 and Homeland, as well as the culture as a whole. While we can speak of external and internal threats to national security and the way that the American government has been seen as either too heavy handed in its pursuit of justice or even downright unconstitutional in its efforts to maintain security by limiting the personal freedoms of the American public, we must also recognize that any minimal outcry over the cessation of civil liberties under the PATRIOT Act generally concerns itself with white Americans, rather than the treatment of Arab Americans. It is, however, notable that while Muslims are seen as the main villains on 24, they are not the only villains. Season one features a villainous plot wrapped up in the events of the Balkans, rather than Baghdad, and several plotlines feature drug cartels or other non-Muslim antagonists. Conversely, Homeland is concerned only with Islamic terrorism. Its whole story structure is based around the question of Nicholas Brody’s faith and whether that faith has turned him against America. By making the

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revelation of his faith a plot point that pushed the audience to assume he was, as Mathison had insisted, a terrorist, the show implies that all Muslims are monsters, and monsters are terrorists. The onus, however, is not on the Arab American or Muslim communities to defend themselves but rather on the white American public to recognize its own bigotry and on the white American media to change its storytelling practices. By continuing to tell stories that demonize Arab Americans and Muslims, both 24 and Homeland perpetuate harmful myths and contribute to the growing fear of violence and paranoia that grips American politics. As studies from Harvard, Purdue, and the University of Illinois have shown, the more positively one feels toward the United States, the more probable it is that one holds strong anti-Arab and anti-Muslim feelings. These cultural traumas and triggers form the backdrop against which the stories of both 24 and Homeland are painted. Neither show could exist in a world without such prejudices—they rely on our fear as an audience to tell their stories. This story, it is worth noting, is one of the triumph of white America in the face of both external and internal challenges, where the virulent Muslim extremism can only be combated by a hero with blond hair, blue eyes, and a common disregard for American civil liberties. That these two shows have been so popular suggests that the American culture as a whole does not find fault with this interpretation of events. Neither Jack Bauer nor Carrie Mathison should represent America, but arguably, both do. As a result of America’s greatest export, our cultural productions, most of the world has seen and been influenced by both 24 and Homeland. The series have aired internationally to good ratings and mixed reviews, and are often seen as representative of American foreign and domestic policy. They contribute greatly to the perception of American actions on the global stage, and, for better or worse, are our ambassadors. They have also shaped American culture. By creating narratives where the loss of civil liberties is necessary to protect freedom and by distancing their characters from the bureaucracies of legal government, the shows have willfully enabled the disconnect between American citizens and their federal government and antiterror agencies, while also perpetuating fear and paranoia and dated racist stereotypes. The stories that we tell define who we are, and these stories give a clear message. We are scared. WORKS CITED Al-Arian, Laila. “TV’s Most Islamophobic Show.” Salon, December 15, 2012. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/w1Fh9r. Aleaziz, Hamed. “Interrogating the Creators of Homeland.” Mother Jones, November 4, 2011. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/p0yfaA.

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Bayoumi, Moustafa. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print. Bumiller, Elisabeth. “Video Shows U.S. Killing of Reuters Employee.” New York Times, April 5, 2010. Web. July 9, 2014.http://goo.gl/0kk1cg. Darwin, Josh. “A Lesson from King Arthur.” The Dream That Was America (blog), April 22, 2009. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/4RKAkL. Hersh, Seymour M. “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” Annals of National Security. New Yorker, May 10, 2004. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/CnzeYp. “Homeland’s Most Hated Character Dana Brody and Mother Jessica ‘Won’t Return as Series Regulars’ in Season Four.” Daily Mail, December 16, 2013. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/Lna4B3. Kurbjuweit, Dirk. “Paradise Lost: Paranoia Has Undermined US Democracy.” Der Spiegel, November 8, 2013. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/snULsN. Lawson, Richard. “The Best Characters on TV Right Now.” Wire, November 2, 2011. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/gNRMBz. Levin, Gary. “Showtime’s Homeland Skeptical of War on Terror.” USA Today, September 28, 2011. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/Nqj5ao. Lewis, Neil. “Broad Use of Harsh Tactics Is Described at Cuba Base.” New York Times, October 16, 2004. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/KJ6bLP. Lichtblau, Eric. “Gonzales Says ’02 Policy on Detainees Doesn’t Bind C.I.A.” New York Times, January 18, 2005. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/A3gMig. Nelson, Aaron Thomas. “Wannabe Heroes outside Capitol Kill Mostly Innocent, Crazy Woman for Being Crazy.” Stateless Media, October 6, 2013. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/KDZsrV. Pew Research. “After Fight over CIA Director Ends, a Look at Public Opinion on Drones.” Pew Research Center, May 7, 2013. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/ fgWV79. Schatz, Adam. “The Left and 9/11.” Nation, September 5, 2002. Web. July 9, 2014. http:/ /goo.gl/rPSsdl. Shabi, Rachel, and Alex Andreou. “Does Homeland Just Wave the American Flag?” Guardian, October 16, 2012. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/G9W4u1. Shalizi, Hamid, and Peter Graff. “U.S. Strikes Killed 140 Villagers: Afghan Probe.” Reuters, May 16, 2009. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/Y0MmLA. Williams-Bridgers, Jacquelyn L. “Statement of Jacquelyn L. Williams-Bridgers.” Congressional Record, May 17, 2000. Web. July 9, 2014. http://goo.gl/dE0aeT.

III

Masculinity, Marginalization, Melancholy, and Hyper-Protection

ELEVEN The Danger That Keeps Knocking Representations of Post-9/11 Masculinity in Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad Shana Kraynak

AMC’s Breaking Bad (2008–2013) is the story of an emasculated highschool science teacher who is diagnosed with terminal cancer and turns to cooking and selling crystal meth in order to put money aside for his family. Facing death, he realizes that he hasn’t fulfilled his role as a provider. He claims to feel alive for the first time as he is willing to do whatever it takes to prove to his family and to himself that he can be a man. Walter White feels that he has not lived an active existence, one in which he has made conscientious choices about who he is, what he does, or what he believes. Having lost control of every aspect of his life, he wants to control how his life ends—actively, not passively. Walt wants to “die like a man” (“Gray Matter”). In this chapter, I will explore what it means to be a man in post-9/11 culture and how Walt’s transformation from a harmless nobody to the brutal kingpin of a meth empire echoes the ways in which masculinity in our culture transformed after 9/11. That viewers tend to root for Walt is indicative of a post-traumatic culture of men who live vicariously through Walt’s reclamation of power and masculine strength, despite the consequences of Walt’s behavior. In order to understand how masculinity changed after 9/11, first we need to take a brief look back at what defined masculinity in the 1990s. Ornamental culture, as defined by Susan Faludi, is the cultural notion that men have become emasculated by a sense of purposelessness in the workforce, in the military, and at home by liberated women; as a result, 131

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masculinity came to be something that can be measured by financial rather than by physical accomplishments. As opposed to an earlier era in which men contributed to a social system in authoritative domains, “ornamental culture [swept] away institutions in which men felt some sense of belonging and [replaced] them with visual spectacles” (Stiffed 35). Masculinity became an image—a visual display—instead of a demonstration. Manhood became something to be measured by consumption, vanity, and even purposeless violence, all because men believed that these were the qualifications necessary for a successful masculine performance, to echo Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Thus, the new man of the 1990s focused on commodification of his gender, capitalistic competition, and the desire to fit in to the society around him by constantly upholding an image of masculine prowess, particularly in response to the threat of femininity. Michael Kimmel sees the correlation between increased equality for women and the masculinity crisis. While the men of the 1990s certainly attempted to reclaim their right to masculinity in their own violent ways, there was also an issue with overt gender segregation as men tried to keep a tight hold on the last remaining manly occupations: “firefighters, police officers, and soldiers represented some of the last remaining resisters of gender equality” (Kimmel 277). The isolation and pressure associated with corporatized, ornamental masculinity was still an anxious issue for men, right up until the events of September 11, which “reversed the fortunes of both images of masculinity. The rehabilitation of heroic masculinity among the firefighters, police, and other rescue workers was immediate” (Kimmel 278). The events of September 11, 2001, have been dissected time and time again as our wounded country has sought meaning in this tragedy. Almost instantly, blame was placed on an American lifestyle that had strayed from religion and traditional gender roles. Just one day after the attacks, Jerry Falwell blamed the “abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians [for] actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle [causing] God to lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812” (The Terror Dream 22). Falwell was not alone in his crazed attack on feminism and its supposed ill effect on our culture. To reaffirm traditional gender roles, images of a remasculinized culture pervaded news media, television, and film in the months and years following 9/11. Following a world-changing event like 9/11, any illusion of normality became a part of our nation’s healing process. Unfortunately, the problem with “getting back to normal” ostensibly means going back to historical notions of gender hierarchies. The resurgence of hegemonic masculinity was ultimately damaging to both genders. Women disappeared from the public sphere to make room for representations of masculine heroism. Ornamental men who were secure in their masculinity prior to 9/11 were now looked down upon as the manly men reclaimed their stance on the pedestal. Media coverage fol-

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lowing the days after the attacks showed image after image of the largerthan-life firefighters, rescuing World Trade Center workers before the buildings collapsed. According to Faludi’s research, the most widely circulated images were those of men rescuing women, although surely men and women equally needed help that day (and female first responders were on scene as well) (The Terror Dream 79). So why privilege the circulation of one photo over another? Once again, women were purged from culture in an attempt to privilege the masculine gender as the predominant cultural image. The reason this parallel is so fascinating for the transformation of Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is that he was a very ineffectual character until he became Heisenberg, a hyper-masculine, extremely powerful character. Before getting involved with meth, Walt was a passive husband and awkward high-school teacher, a man not really taken seriously as any kind of strong authority figure. He had potential to do great things with his life, given his high level of intelligence, but fell short of his dreams and was emasculated both at home and at work. When he was diagnosed with cancer, he lost control over the last thing he really had any power over: his body. This loss is a significant one because “men’s bodies have long been symbols of masculinity in America. They reveal (or at least signify) manhood’s power, strength, and self-control” (Connell 248). With his last vestige of masculinity slipping away, Walt desperately seeks to regain control of his manhood. His transformation begins in the every first episode. The show opens on a desert landscape; a pair of men’s trousers floats through the bright blue sky, filling with air, embodied with emptiness as they crash into the ground and are immediately run over by the tire of an RV. We cut to the driver of the RV, a crazed, nearly naked man wearing a gas mask, driving erratically through the dusty landscape. A panic-stricken Walt emerges from the RV wearing high-waisted white underwear. He puts on a green button-down shirt and records a desperate message to his family, explaining that his actions were done out of love for them. After placing the camera and his wallet on the ground, he regains composure, stands in the middle of the desert road as sirens approach the scene of his crashed RV. He aims a pistol in the direction of the sound, appearing to be unwilling to go down without a fight. Cue the opening credits to the series and a flashback to how all this madness began. Although we flashback to three weeks earlier, it’s clear that the issues that Walt confronts start long before his fiftieth birthday. A day in the life of Walter White begins at the breakfast table with his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), who is pregnant with their second child, and their son Walter Jr., who is a teenager with cerebral palsy. For Walt’s birthday, Skyler spells out “50” on his breakfast plate with veggie bacon, a new healthy choice that she’s made for the family. This minor breakfast tweak appears to be nothing more than a helpful wife concerned about her husband’s health,

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but from the demeanor present in the room, it’s clear that Skyler makes the decisions for her household. It’s clear that Walt isn’t a fan of the bacon, but neither he nor his son has a say in the matter. After a full day of being emasculated by his disinterested high-school students and his boss at his second job at a car wash, he arrives home to a surprise birthday party, which begins with Skyler chastising him for being late. During the party, all the attention is on Hank (Dean Norris), Walt’s macho DEA-agent brother-in-law, whose most recent drug bust is the buzz of the party. The party quiets down to listen to his story. Walt’s own son is paying more attention to Hank than his father. Hank tells a riveting recap of the day’s events and gives his handgun to Walter Jr. to look at. Walt’s discomfort is obvious, so Hank encourages Walt to hold the weapon. It’s clear that Walt has no idea how to hold it. Hank emasculates him in front of the whole party by saying, “That’s why they hire men” to carry them (“Pilot”). Hank’s actions infer the assumption that there is a gender hierarchy embedded in hegemonic masculinity that places strong men on the top—Hank—and weak men (and women)— Walt— at the bottom. That Walt is ignored at his own birthday party is one thing, but that Hank—the hyper-masculine hero—is the one emasculating Walt is significant. Throughout the series, masculinity is measured by one person establishing power over another. The power structure is established as soon as Walt awkwardly holds the gun, which is a symbol of masculine oppression and violence: “It is, overwhelmingly, the dominant gender who hold and use [guns as a] means of violence” (Connell 83). Connell goes on to explain that men are armed far more frequently than women, as the weaker gender is culturally disarmed and, therefore, unable to protect itself. The gun validates Hank’s masculinity and diminishes Walt’s. Hank shows that the dominant gender is the idealized hero with a gun who takes down criminals, thus protecting subordinated men and women from harm. Walt can do nothing in the moment to reclaim the masculinity that was taken from him by Hank. Only Hank can give and take power in the hierarchy. Upon realizing that he is taking all the attention away from Walt, Hank offers a toast to Walt on his birthday, joking about Walt’s intelligence as a negative trait. Hank all but cuts himself off, however, to take the focus back to himself and the news story. Hank is on the TV discussing the raid, and Walt becomes enamored by the boxes of cash seized by the police. Another manly olive branch is offered, though, when Hank offers to take Walt on a ride along to add some excitement into his life. Throughout the series, however, we learn that Hank’s hypermasculine identity is a performance that he uses to hide his own fears. Ultimately, Walt feels emasculated by a man whose identity is inauthentic. Walt’s emasculation continues after the party is over, and Skyler attempts to give him a little birthday present in the bedroom. With one

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hand on her laptop and one hand underneath the blankets, she halfheartedly attempts to give Walt a hand job. Most of her focus is on an item she is selling in an eBay auction, yet, she wonders why Walt can’t get an erection. When the auction ends, Skyler forgets entirely about Walt because she is excited about the money she earned. In this moment, Skyler shows her dominance once more. First, she controls the sexual encounter, deciding the terms and conditions of the sexual encounter. Second, as she is earning money for the family, she reverses the role of provider. As Kimmel points out, men are expected to fulfill the role of provider; Walt’s failure to provide is metaphorically represented in his inability to get an erection. In feeling like he has failed as a provider and as a man, he is unable to perform as such. Later, when Walt goes on a ride along with Hank and his partner Steve Gomez, he sees his future partner in crime Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). Pinkman, a former student of Walt’s, has everything that Walt doesn’t: a steady (and impressive) cash flow, power, and sexual freedom. It is significant indeed that we meet both of these main characters when they are not wearing pants. Walt, of course, emerges from the RV as an old, disheveled wreck, and Jesse sneaks out a bedroom window leaving behind a beautiful, blonde one-night stand. Jesse isn’t confined by a daily routine and goes completely against the grain to get what he wants. Walt played his entire life by the book, and not only did he get cheated by his friends, not only does his wife control his every move, but he also never smoked a cigarette and still ended up with lung cancer. It’s no wonder that Walt, after losing that last thing he had control over—his body— looked at Hank’s drug bust as an opportunity to reclaim his masculinity as the provider for his family. With Walt’s diagnosis and the notion of having nothing left to lose, he blackmails Jesse into becoming partners in cooking and selling meth. Walt steals equipment from work while Jesse secures an RV they can use as a mobile laboratory. They drive into the desert to ensure that their activities will be undetected. Walt undresses to keep his good clothes free from the smell of chemicals. Although Walt is the one in charge of the operation, Jesse makes attempts to verbally establish his own masculinity. As he refers to Walt as a “homo” for undressing, for being a “faggot” for using safety equipment, or a “bitch” in just about every scenario, Jesse’s gendered language establishes hegemony: “oppression positions homosexual masculinities at the bottom of a gender hierarchy among men” (Connell 78). Although Walt identifies as heterosexual, Jesse uses Walt’s precautionary behaviors as a tool of emasculation. Real men, as Jesse presupposes, aren’t so carefully refined; they’re not afraid to get their hands dirty. Comparing Walt to a woman or to a homosexual man is meant to diminish his power. After the first batch is cooked, Jesse must find a way to distribute it. Krazy-8 and Emilio force Jesse to take them to their cook spot, and, of

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course, the situation escalates quickly. Guns blazing, threats are made, and Walt offers to show them how to cook his meth in order to save himself and to save Jesse. While demonstrating, Walt improperly mixes two chemicals in order to poison his captors. At this point, we are caught up to where the series began. Walt begins erratically driving the RV away from the scene of the crime, he crashes, and emerges in his tighty whiteys. He stands in the middle of the dirt road, and the sirens approach the scene. He lowers his gun, and aims it at his throat. He pulls the trigger, and the gun clicks, misfiring. He pulls the trigger again, aimed toward the ground, and a bullet pierces the dust. In an anguished moment, we see Walt’s frustration at his inability to take his own life. However, upon realizing that the sirens are coming from fire trucks, he hides his weapon and eventually returns home. He sneaks into bed in the middle of the night. Skyler is still awake and asks where Walt has been. He avoids the question by kissing Skyler and aggressively flipping her body over to face away from him as he makes love to her. The sex is consensual, but Skyler’s question, “Walt, is that you?” indicates that she is clearly not used to sexual dominance from her husband (“Pilot”). Prior to becoming involved in the meth business, Walt has been an outsider looking in to the notions of hegemonic masculinity. He has been the victim of emasculation and oppression by other men throughout his life and is only able to achieve his own masculinity at the expense of others. In the span of fifty-eight minutes, the pilot episode of Breaking Bad establishes a number of key rhetorical functions of masculinity: providing, protecting, strength, power, and money. Not only does the show speak to the issue of hegemonic masculinity, but also it speaks to costs of transformative masculinity in post-9/11 culture. As the show continues, hyper-masculinity and domination takes over Walt as he becomes more like Heisenberg than Walt. He leaves devastation at every turn, making no apologies for his actions, actions supposedly aimed at helping his family—just as U.S. military and government actions were supposedly aimed at keeping our country safe. But in trying to protect them financially, Walt’s actions put his family in grave danger. We ultimately learn that he wasn’t doing it for family. He did it simply because he “liked it.” It made him feel like more of a man to be in control of such a powerful business, treating the people around him as expendable as he built his empire and reaffirmed the power that is associated with white masculinity. Additionally, Walt takes his newfound masculinity out on women and minorities—both perceived as outsiders to the American ideal of strong masculinity. Walt’s obsession with his own image, empire, and power closely parallels the resurgence of a certain rugged type of masculinity in the United States after 9/11, a time in which vengeance and violence were often synonymous with heroism and pride.

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Peggy Noonan’s opinion piece “Welcome Back, Duke” appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 12, 2001, and showed the immediacy with which our culture looked to revamp masculine identity. The subtitle “From the Ashes of September 11, Arise the Manly Virtues” articulates that manly virtues were reborn from the ashes of 9/11. The manly men rose from the flames like the fabled phoenix, leaving behind the days of weakness caused by supposed moral decay and gender equality. Noonan declares, Men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11. You might say it suddenly emerged from the rubble of the past quarter century, and emerged when a certain kind of man came forth to get our great country out of the fix it was in. I am speaking of masculine men. . . . We are experiencing a new respect for their old-fashioned masculinity, a new respect for physical courage, for strength and for the willingness to use both for the good of others. (Noonan)

Defining masculinity by virtue of physical strength not only defines what a man is (or should be) but also what a man is not. This implies that the opposite of masculinity is feminine weakness. Not only do women not fit the characteristics of masculinity, but this definition also excludes men whose occupations do not require pushing, pulling, or building things (men like Walter White). Noonan explains that “old-fashioned” masculinity is returning because that’s what saved us on 9/11. She argues that the images of firefighters and policemen confirmed what is great about masculinity and why our country must return to these ideals: “because manliness wins wars.” Noonan half-heartedly blames herself, believing that every time a woman rejects help from a man so that she can assert her own strength men are pushed away from chivalry. Each strong-willed woman is responsible for displacing and damaging masculinity and is now responsible for stepping out of the spotlight and letting the manly man push and pull and build as much as he wants. Skyler White, in theory, is partly to blame for Walt’s vengeance against his own emasculation. It is no coincidence that the title of Noonan’s article references John Wayne, a man whom she believes was similarly damaged and run off by feminism. Feminism came at the expense of masculinity, and Noonan does not believe this is progress or an improvement. She, along with many others, welcomes a newfound John Wayne era of masculinity. Celebrating traditional masculinity and heroism alleviated the pain caused by displaced or damaged masculinity. Returning to the historical image of masculinity confirmed again the American ideology of justified military aggression and violence. Post-9/11 media latched on to gender archetypes as a way to grieve and as way to reinvent America, which we had supposedly let become so feminine and weak, so that we could win

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the War on Terror. Although Walt’s quest isn’t a war, he is engaged in a battle with clear outsider enemies who will defend themselves by any means necessary. J. Ann Tickner argues that war is considered a masculine activity, stating that “gender is a powerful legitimator of war and national security, [which drives] our acceptance of a ‘remasculinized’ society” (336). In order for the War on Terror to be successful, then, our military and our culture supported historical notions of gender ideology, privileging masculinity over femininity. For Walt to be successful, he must engage in preemptive violence in order to secure the empire he is building. This comes at the expense of everyone around him, and Walt doesn’t care so long as his empire remains intact. One of the most obvious moments of Walt’s willingness to do anything for his empire is his treatment of children throughout the series. He poisons one boy in order to control Jesse’s behavior and is complicit in the murder of another child who is a witness to their train heist in the episode titled “Dead Freight” in season five (the train heist itself is another nod to the Western genre). The child is considered collateral damage; his loss is a means to an end. That end, of course, is self-preservation by preemptively eliminating a threat. The Bush Doctrine allows for preemptive action against perceived threats. The Bush White House, in fact, followed much of the logic used by Walter White to defend his own exceptionalism: surveillance, causalities, collateral damage, torture, you name it, all in the name of supposedly protecting our nation from outside threats. Ultimately, these actions (like Walt’s) caused more harm than good. It is impossible to ignore the political implications associated with the “rehabilitation of heroic masculinity” in popular culture (Kimmel 253). Michael S. Kimmel discusses the ways in which George W. Bush’s reelection campaign reaffirmed the dominant roles of so-called traditional masculinity. Bush became the icon of the resurgence of rugged cowboy masculinity. For this reason, the very location of Breaking Bad is significant to the telling of the story. The show features stunningly beautiful Southwest imagery. Desert landscapes and mountains provide the setting for Walt’s masculine performance. His trademark fedora becomes a modern cowboy hat. This matters for a post-9/11 discussion because of the cultural resurgence of Western ideals following the attacks. The cowboy was the quintessential manly man, the defender against evil. The cowboy persona was utilized again and again in the media and even by George W. Bush, whose very image was Westernized to showcase his supposed ability to protect us with his historical notion of justice. The danger here is that “the Western as a film genre and its self-conscious cult of inarticulate masculine heroism” influences the thoughts and behaviors of viewers (Connell 194). The image of John Wayne’s masculinity shaped the way that men in American culture defined and measured their own masculinity in the 1950s. In a culture that no longer sought to conquer, men still

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needed a way to feel powerful. As the gender hierarchy continued to shift, the power of women was also considered a threat to manhood. It’s clear that this issue continues to transcend time, as the threat of female strength continues to terrify men. While Skyler becomes less and less active in their relationship and as a character, other women step into the picture. Jane is Jesse’s apartment manager and a recovering addict. Shortly after Jesse moves into the building, the two begin a romantic relationship. Jane starts using drugs again and eventually tries to blackmail Walt into giving the couple money so they can leave town and start a new life. Once Jane becomes the decision maker in her relationship with Jesse, she becomes the literalized threat to masculinity, as perceived in our culture after 9/11. Walt has no choice but to eliminate her as a threat. Walt sneaks into Jesse’s apartment late at night and sees Jane struggling to breathe. In this moment, he easily could have saved her life but chose to do nothing. This eradicates the threat and allows him to keep his hands clean. However, his inaction doesn’t just get rid of an oppressive female presence; Jane’s death brings about a horrific airline accident. Jane’s grieving father is responsible for the collision of two jetliners in midair. The imagery of the plane crash clearly harkens back to the imagery of 9/11, the most visual event in our history. Attempting to preserve gender hierarchies will ultimately cause more harm than good, and the greater threat to culture is hyper-masculinity, not femininity. This parallels the trajectory of the United States following 9/11 as we were marched into war in the hopes of maintaining exceptionalism by any means necessary. In the episode titled “Ozymandias,” Walt finally faces the consequences for maintaining his powerful image. The title comes from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, which speaks to the impermanence of power and reputation. Heisenberg’s reign in the meth business is short-lived, and even though he might be remembered by some as an all-powerful man, he will be remembered by most as a monster. By this point, Jesse has teamed up with Hank in order to try to bring Walt down. In this particular episode, Walt is tracked to the burial location of his money, first by Hank, Jesse, and Gomez and then by the neo-Nazi gang that he hired to take Jesse out. The Nazi gang’s appearance is due to miscommunication, but Hank is shot in front of Walt, who genuinely appears to be devastated by the loss, weakened and sobbing on the desert sand. To reestablish his own power, he hands Jesse over to the gang so he will be killed. But before Jesse is taken away, he tells Jesse, “I was there and I watched her die. I watched her overdose and choke to death. I could have saved her, but I didn’t” (“Ozymandias”). Walt could have never told Jesse that he allowed Jane to die, and he would have gotten away with it. But losing Hank, losing millions of dollars to the gang, and losing his image of power requires him to counteract the loss by emasculating Jesse. Jesse’s

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life is now in the hands of Walt, who wants him dead, and he finds a way to make this betrayal even worse by admitting what he did. In this story, Walt gains power by taking it from others, showing the destructive power of masculinity. This power frequently comes at the expense of women and minorities, those who are typically the most affected by white male masculinity. That each of Walt’s enemies is Latino represents the fear of Others embedded in our news media, film, and television shows after 9/11. The desire for immediate vengeance unleashed resounding racism. That the “bad guys” in Breaking Bad are brown-skinned speaks significantly to the issue of racism. Of the socalled bad guys, Walt is the worst of them all. He is complicit in the murder of a child, he poisons another child to manipulate his trusting partner, he watched an overdosing woman choke to death and, as a result, is partly to blame for the horrific airline accident, and he has murdered people to protect himself—all in the time span of a few months! It is problematic that viewers root for a white character taking out the non-white characters (Krazy-8, Emilio, Tuco, Gus, Hector) as if Walt is some kind of hero. Indeed, the presence of a neo-Nazi gang shows just how much hegemonic masculinity can damage our culture. Walt has built a capitalist empire by utilizing his own white privilege. The brown characters of the show are there to be manipulated and killed to tell Walt’s story. Walt’s ultimate demise was on his own terms, yet the minority characters who die are those who were outsmarted by Walt and died on his terms. In thinking back to the first few years after 9/11 and the increase of real-life hate crimes along with fictional depictions of brown people as terrorists, there is a connection between Walt’s empire being built on the bodies of subordinated people. The percentage of “good” and “bad” characters broken down by race is similarly problematic yet representative of our culture’s worship of white heroism, especially after the attacks. A similar cultural shift occurred in our culture after World War II. What follows can easily be applied to post-9/11 culture. The hero archetype in popular culture helps to reaffirm dominant masculine ideals and behavior. Following a victory in WWII and facing threats of the Cold War, the Western became a great escape for viewers who wanted to feel dominant and in control in terms of global dominance and, most importantly, masculine heroics. In the Western, men were strong and victorious heroes: “In the evolution of the American myth system, the cowboy western provided an archetypal template for cleansing little villages beset by vicious evildoers” (Lawrence and Jewett 89). Facing and defeating enemies was an allegory for not just the international threat of the Cold War but also the threat of American women attempting to destroy masculinity. Overcoming evildoers in film represented American power to dominate at home and abroad. Walter White is a new-age cowboy, purging women and outsiders from American culture to preserve white masculine exceptionalism. Essentially, he seeks

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revenge against all those who emasculated him. Instead of the Cold War, post-9/11 culture faced the War on Terror. Instead of Russians, Americans feared men from the Middle East. It’s clear that as our culture faces threats, it retreats to hegemonic masculinity to protect itself. Immediately after 9/11, our media bombarded us with images of heroic masculinity at the expense of those who did not conform to hegemonic masculinity. Walter White is the quintessential example of an emasculated man who uses trauma as a motivator for hyper-masculine behaviors. While Walt paid the ultimate price for his actions, he died happily surrounded by what he loved most—his power. Despite ruining the lives of countless people, Walt never learned his lesson or apologized for what he did. He reclaimed what he perceived to be taken from him—his masculinity—and never looked back. His mission was accomplished but at great personal expense. Much like Bush’s “Mission Accomplished,” the image of achievement was more important than actual victory. In each case, the image of masculinity was successfully projected, but the actual performances were great failures. This parallel shows the costs of privileging ideology and exceptionalism embedded in hegemonic masculinity. While the show aims to condemn Walt’s behaviors and illuminate the consequences of hegemonic masculinity, many Breaking Bad viewers have rooted for Heisenberg. Male viewers don’t want to be Heisenberg, necessarily, but they can certainly empathize with a man assaulted by the pressures of masculinity conferred on him by society and the resentment that follows when failing to live up to unrealistic expectations. Because our culture is driven by and learns behavior from images in mass media, it is important for representations of masculinity and gender performance to suggest possibilities beyond the confines of normative structures. While Breaking Bad may appear to celebrate hyper-masculinity and criminality, the show actually confirms just how damaging hegemonic masculinity is to both men and women. WORKS CITED Connell, R. W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Print. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Print. ———. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Print. “Gray Matter.” Breaking Bad. Written by Vince Gilligan. Directed by Tricia Brock. High Bridge Entertainment. 2008. DVD. Kimmel, Michael S. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print. Lawrence, John Shelton, and Robert Jewett. The Myth of the American Superhero. Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2002. Print. Noonan, Peggy. “Welcome Back Duke.” Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2001. Web.

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“Ozymandias.” Breaking Bad. Written by Vince Gilligan. Directed by Rian Johnson. High Bridge Entertainment. 2013. DVD. “Pilot.” Breaking Bad. Written by Vince Gilligan. Directed by Vince Gilligan. High Bridge Entertainment. 2008. DVD. Tickner, J. Ann. “Feminist Perspectives on 9/11.” International Studies Perspectives 2 (2002): 333–50. Print.

TWELVE Post-Closet and Post-9/11 The Bromantic Imagination of Disaster in This Is the End and I’m So Excited! Ken Feil

The tragic losses and shocking sights of the September 11 terrorist attacks impacted a range of cultural forms and activities in the United States, in particular, two of the most popular Hollywood genres of the late 1990s: disaster movies and romantic comedies. The imagery of 9/11 jarringly approximated, commentators repeatedly observed, the spectacular attractions of Godzilla (1998), Armageddon (1998), and Independence Day (1996), films that decimated cities in the comedic, alternately self-parodying, thrill-ride aesthetics of “high concept camp” (Kakoudaki 109–10; Feil, Dying 119–24; Keane 93–94). The disproportionate dose of reality delivered on 9/11 rendered the giddy, ironic 1990s disaster films tastelessly insensitive and negated their escapist delights (Feil 121–24; Markovitz 201, 203–8). The tragedy associated with New York’s broken buildings and traumatized citizenry also belied the escapist pleasures of romantic comedies: idealized, luxurious, urban romance. “The post-9/11 chick flick,” as Diane Negra notes, “finds itself unable to fully perpetuate the urban romanticization so characteristic of its predecessors” (52). Romantic comedies and disaster movies retrenched their cultural appeal and power after 9/11 by reinstating hegemonic constructions of gender as a correlate to reconstructing U.S. strength. The challenge 9/11 posed to U.S. national identity intersected with a prevailing sense that patriarchal masculinity had been “fractured,” not only by the terrorist attacks and ensuing wars but also by feminism, the gay-rights move143

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ment, and the diminishing socioeconomic authority of patriarchal figures (Alilunas; Weinman 42). Negra explains that the post-9/11 romantic comedy “was obliged to indemnify itself against any fracturing, . . . and the most common strategy for doing so entails a linkage between the open contemplation of urban structural integrity and the rehabilitation of masculinity” (52). Post-feminist heroines who eschewed career for marriage and family proliferated in films such as Two Weeks’ Notice (2002) and Maid in Manhattan (2002), generated from the idea that “a return to traditional roles (including re-essentialized gender roles)” could cure “national grief and anger after the attacks” as well as restore a solid sense of “citizenship” (Negra 56). The post-9/11 restoration of heteronormative gender roles and domestic stability also manifested in disaster movies such as The Sum of All Fears (2002), The Day after Tomorrow (2004), and World Trade Center (2006) (Negra 51). These films nostalgically consign their characters to gender roles recycled from classic disaster movies: action-oriented, scientifically minded male heroes leading compliant female victims and “caretakers” (Randell 142–44, 147, 149; Bell-Metereau 146). By proving the durability of traditional gender roles in the face of disaster and redeeming their authenticity, post-9/11 disaster movies affirm the durability of the United States after the terrorist attacks. The ideological contours of action-disaster movies and romantic comedies prove a bit more complicated, however, when considering two additional variables of post-9/11 film culture, to begin with, the emergence of a generic counterpart to the post-feminist romantic comedy: the “postcloset” bromance, comedies such as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2003) and The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) that refocus attention from heterosexual romance to intense intimacy between ostensibly heterosexual men (DeAngelis, “Introduction” 3; Weinman 31–32). Second, after a virtual post-9/11 drought, a new crop of films emerged that fused comedy and disaster. Both of these trends converge in 2013 with a stream of bromantic disaster movies: mainstream pictures such as This Is the End, The World’s End, and White House Down, in addition to Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s art-house farce I’m So Excited! (Los Amantes Pasajeros). 1 Concentrating on This Is the End and I’m So Excited!, this chapter examines changes in the post-9/11 genre formulas of disaster movie, romantic comedy, and their normative ideological functions. When the quasiqueer bromance replaces hetero-mance, and comedy invades the solemnity of disaster narratives, these films renegotiate the hegemonic backlash that marked the first decade of the post-9/11 era, in particular, the junction of durable American identity with the rehabilitation of traditional gender roles and resuscitation of patriarchal heteronormativity. This Is the End (2013) combines bromantic comedy with disaster movie clichés in a narrative that associates straight “guy love” with both doomsday and salvation. For stars Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Craig Robin-

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son, Jonah Hill, and Danny McBride, all playing themselves, this reflexive satire of stardom, decadence, and masculinity employs the apocalypse to test bromantic ethics; those who sacrifice themselves for their “bros”—Rogen, Baruchel, and Robinson—can eternally frolic together in heaven. That the film jettisons the post-9/11 priorities of patriotism and machismo for a post-closet, post-Bush utopia where such allegiances are irrelevant coincides smoothly with rising social and legal normalization of homosexuality. 2 This Is the End finally distances itself, however, from any associations with homosexuality by envisioning the bromantic utopia of heaven as safely asexual (Becker, “Becoming Bromosexual” 251–52). The ironic use of homophobic stereotypes (McBride remains an earthbound cannibal with Channing Tatum as his sex slave) exemplifies what Becker refers to as a common, post-closet strategy: “highly polysemic comedic representations” that signify as satirical to “gay and gay-friendly viewers” as well as placate homophobic attitudes (Becker, “Guy Love” 136). The exclusion of Franco from the firmament (he becomes McBride’s dinner) in addition to Tatum also signifies from a heteronormative perspective, given each star’s exemplary post-closet persona, ostensibly heterosexual yet renowned for ostentatiously blurring straight and gay. In contrast to the asexual bromancers in heaven, “straight” men on earth feed on icons of queer stardom for sex and cuisine. Bromantic relations flourish in paradise, but bromosexuality remains a living hell. In I’m So Excited!, Almodóvar reimagines the junction of bromosexuality and disaster from an outsider perspective—gay, feminist, Spanish— that the director has famously employed to deconstruct other Hollywood genres, such as melodrama (Volver) and film noir (Bad Education). The director here deploys the archaic characteristics of imperiled airplane movies such as No Highway in the Sky (1951), The High and the Mighty (1954), and most obviously Airport (1970) to envision the potential for a post-9/11 sexual utopia driven by queer, feminist desire. Consistent with classic disaster pictures, the ensemble of airline crew and passengers form a social cross-section facing probable death, and in classic disastermovie fashion, the film concentrates on the characters’ reactions to imminent disaster, the symbolism of the disaster (moral, emotional, carnal, religious, political), and the characters’ unification in the face of disaster (Yacowar 224–26; Roddick 252). Amid the repetition of plot points and clichés from Airport, Almodóvar thwarts regressive nostalgia for the 1970s format and ideological values engaged by post-9/11 disaster films by reversing the pattern analyzed by Negra. Instead of reaffirming the “structural integrity” of the airliner by reinforcing traditional masculinity, Almodóvar associates safety and survival with subversive gender performativity, sexual fluidity, and carnivalesque pleasure. I’m So Excited! likewise thwarts the bromance’s hegemonic priorities: by elevating usually marginal, gay stereotypical characters, in particular the flamboyantly gay protagonist, flight attendant Joserra; and by celebrating sexual

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pleasure liberated from the confines of binaries, such as feminine/masculine and gay/straight (Weinman 34, 47–8). The structural integrity of both the plane and larger society in I’m So Excited! coincides with the subversion of rigid gender roles and sexual categories, not their restoration, as well as an embrace of queer sexual pleasure that This Is the End, in typical bromantic fashion, ultimately refuses. Nick Roddick’s formative observations about 1970s disaster films prove prescient in their application to post-9/11 disaster films, rom-coms and brom-coms; these genres exhibit “how a cultural industry reacts to a period of economic and political crisis . . . and how culture can become ideologically active” (245). Stephen Keane locates the ideological consistencies and functions of these genres when he argues, “The post-9/11 imagination of disaster is above all domestic. . . . It is an attempt to come to terms with the specific events of 9/11 and its pervasive after-effects. . . . Action and disaster movies have always been domestic, and now, it would appear, have a new responsibility to face up to” (93). The “new responsibility” remains for these genres to locate and repair any “internal breach” that could cause catastrophe (Keane 93), namely, the patriarchal masculinity symbolically damaged by the terrorist attacks. Post-9/11 action-disaster movies, for instance, such as The Sum of All Fears, The Day after Tomorrow, and World Trade Center, recycle the narrative structure and moral causality of 1970s disaster movies, all of which reinstate male superiority. In “the world before the disaster,” Roddick explains, “society . . . has lost its ‘frontier values,’ has grown weak through excessive self-indulgence and total reliance on a protective shell of technology, whose moral codes are threatened by liberalism and permissiveness” (257–58). The tropes of frontier values remain entrenched in the themes of national unity and conservative gender politics, embodied by male characters who “rejoin the heroes of the American frontier” as well as master technology (Roddick 257). Female characters are not far afoot from the same archaic models, as wives, mothers, and followers of the male leader (Ryan and Kellner 52–56). 3 As the male protagonists of post-9/11 disaster movies strive to prevent or overcome disaster, they illustrate a similar narrative causality as in 1970s films: “The disaster . . . can thus be seen as an expiation of the guilt felt about this [loss of traditional values] and a punishment of the implied transgression” (Roddick 257). The redemption of American “frontier values” in these films correlates with the resuscitation of patriarchal, masculine supremacy. The rom-com and brom-com concentrate on private, intimate emotional life as a means of resolving the same domestic anxieties. The romcom refashions its career woman protagonist for motherhood, romance, and reliance on a man, while the brom-com faces the problem of the “modern ‘boy-man’” who, despite the “female resolve” to mature him and the patriarchal “breadwinner ethic” to motivate him, “strives for perpetual adolescence over social relevance” (Weinman 43; Negra 54–55).

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Jenna Weinman reasons that “the brom-com cycle retains strong ties to the rom-com because the narratives are at least superficially propelled by the redemptive promises of the heteronormative paradigm—indeed, despite their raunch content, proponents of the religious right . . . have praised brom-coms such as Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin for their family values” (43–44). Weinman alludes here to the primary narrative trajectory of most bromances: man-boys maturing into suitable partners for heterosexual marriage and fatherhood, the narrative progression to what Michael DeAngelis calls “straight time.” Bromance narratives play out the tension between “straight time”—associated with the linear movement toward heteronormative “futurity”—and “queer time,” an eternally playful present or future born out of dissatisfaction with reality’s constrictions (DeAngelis “Queerness” 214–17, 228). Although the brom-com’s narrative delights pervade the “queer time” sections, when the bros play, express affection, and evade adult responsibility, the films nonetheless proceed to heteronormative straight time: a future of heterosexual romance, family, and career (DeAngelis, “Queerness” 226–29). This Is the End deviates from other bromances by rejecting the narrative movement to “straight time,” however, without necessarily subverting the post-closet, post-feminist ideological functions of brom-coms and disaster movies. The bromance between man-boys Jay Baruchel and Seth Rogen motivates the action and punctuates the film’s moral message; bromantic suffering and sacrifice restore the heroes’ “frontier spirit,” saving them from damnation and securing their entrance to heaven. Despite suggestions of queer desire and gender-role critique, This Is the End marginalizes female and queer subjectivity. Typical of brom-coms, the film envisions the loss of heterosexual masculinity and privilege as disgusting, perverse, and traumatic and by marginalizing women, gays, and homosexual desire, trumpets ambivalence about women’s and LGBTQ social-political gains as well as reasserts the boundaries between feminine/masculine and queer/straight (Greven 14–16; Alilunas; Weinman 44, 47, 49; Feil, “From Batman” 168–69; Miller 147–48). In the film, Seth drags Jay to James Franco’s bacchanalian housewarming party, an extensive spectacle of young stars decadently engaging in wild sex and drug-taking. Interrupting the hedonistic narcissism, apocalypse commences: a sinkhole swallows the bulk of celebrity guests into hellfire; infernos engulf the countryside; hounds of hell, demons, and Lucifer appear; and the saved ascend to heaven in blue light. Holed up at Franco’s, Rogen and Baruchel join their host and other bromance costars, Robinson and McBride from Pineapple Express (2008) and Hill from Superbad (2007). After demons possess Hill, Robinson ascends to heaven, and Franco provides a meal for post-apocalyptic gang-leader McBride, Rogen and Baruchel prove their bromantic devotion just in time to elude Lucifer’s clutches and ascend to the pearly gates, where Robinson welcomes them to a colossal white party.

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When women enter the bromantic narrative, their deviation from traditional gender roles alienates the man-boy characters. Partying before apocalypse hits, sitcom star Mindy Kaling repulses Jay with her macho bravado: “Oh my god, if I don’t fuck Michael Cera tonight I’m gonna blow my brains out. . . . Fucking pale, 110 pounds, hairless, probably has a huge cock, coked out of his mind.” When Emma Watson returns to Franco’s house during Armageddon, the beautiful, vulnerable Harry Potter star initially appeals to the bros, but when she overhears them pondering the “rapey vibe,” Watson head-butts Rogen with an ax handle, beheads Franco’s giant statue of an erect phallus, and flees with all their provisions. Such performative inversions of the masculine/feminine binary expose gender as “fabrication . . . as nothing other than the effects of drag,” in the memorable words of Judith Butler (29). Kaling and Watson accrue agency through their “feminist camp,” their mocking, critical parodies of restrictive gender roles and the male gaze (Robertson 9–13), but typical of bromance, male characters dominate the narrative, and any gender critique, androgyny, and queer behavior can be disavowed or forgotten. This Is the End likewise forecloses on the radical possibilities for an enduring “queer time.” The lack of wives, girlfriends, or daughters to pressure the protagonists into maturity, typical of bromantic disaster pictures (World’s End, Whitehouse Down), negates the primary structuring device of most bromances; 4 if there is no heteronormative future for maturity at the end of the world, Rogen, Baruchel, and Robinson can eternally frolic. DeAngelis defines the significance of bromantic queer time, commenting on the sleepover scene in Superbad: “for the few minutes of plot time . . . the friends relish an immersion in the present, unconcerned about what may or may not have been wasted or lost, not anxious about boundaries, rules, or what will come next—both anchored and liberated in . . . ‘moments of queer relational bliss’” (227). Achieving that eternal, rapturous present in Rogen and Baruchel’s bromance, replete with queer connotations, remains This Is the End’s goal and destination. When the bros cavort at Rogen’s abode before the party, his gifts of pot, munchies, and games immediately invoke signifiers of sexual pleasure: “I know you don’t love it in L.A.,” Rogen explains, “so I figure . . . I’ll lube up your entry a little bit.” Baruchel affirms, “This is the much needed foreplay,” a sensation that soon dissipates at Franco’s party. The end of days nearly begets the end of their bromance, a melodramatic rift conventional for brom-coms, but reconciliation proves their timeless bond. Similar to DeAngelis’s interpretation of Superbad, when the bros reconcile and reaffirm their love during their sleepover, This Is the End “responds to the melodramatic inquiry ‘if only it were not too late,’ and also to straight time’s compulsion to move on to new future goals and accomplishments, by letting time stop, and by offering the narrative ‘scene’ that might accommodate reconnection of the protago-

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nists somewhere within the continuous present” (“Queerness” 226–27). As a gigantic, well-endowed Satan (fashioned after any number of heavy metal posters) prepares to squash the bros, Jay apologizes to Seth with “if only” regret: “I should have changed with you. We should have changed together. . . . Let’s die together.” Rogen responds, “I love you, Jay,” and when it appears that he is preventing Jay from ascending heaven-bound, Seth vows, “I don’t deserve to go to heaven, but you do.” As the love song “I Will Always Love You” climaxes in its famously hyperbolic glissando, the bros hold hands on a giddy flight to the firmament. The film leaves the bros in “the continuous present” of paradise to engage in as much pointless, queer behavior as they wish; Seth puffs a joint as Jay dances to the Backstreet Boys alongside fellow celestial celebrants. This Is the End establishes the “queer relational bliss” between Rogen and Baruchel in the opening scenes and then seals their pleasure in the queerest of time zones, the most enduring present imaginable: eternity. The film nevertheless restrains the infinity of queer bromantic time, first by erasing women such as Kaling and Watson from the central plot and then deleting both queer icons and sexual activity from the rewards of heaven. Franco fails to graduate to heaven due to his “textbook vanity,” as Jay comments, a quality part and parcel of his “straight queer” significance (Jones 193–95). As Adrian Jones argues of Franco’s avant-garde “vanity” projects, his experimental films and art installations, the actor “situates his body as a queerly porous site to be cut, written upon, desired, and played with” (Jones 197), a dynamic This Is the End dramatizes. Greeting Rogen and Baruchel to his new, self-designed home, Franco affirms, “You two just stepped inside of me,” to which Rogen puns, “You let us both ‘cum’ inside you. Yeah.” Franco’s vanity eventually curtails his ascent to heaven and drops him back into McBride’s bloodthirsty clutches, now to fatally fulfill his queer potential to be “cut, written upon, desired, and played with.” The film’s other explicitly queered celebrity Channing Tatum appears as McBride’s collared and leashed sex toy. 5 “I butt-fucked this dude,” brags McBride, who continues to gloat over his celebrity slave (“I call him Channing Tate-Yum”) amid boasting to Rogen, Baruchel, and Franco, “I’m a cannibal, hombre, we’re gonna fucking eat your ass.” In contrast to heaven, safely asexualized, sanitized, and literally white, McBride and his sex slave materialize earth-bound, apocalyptic sexuality. When McBride collapses sodomy with cannibalism—his access to “Tate-Yum’s” rear, his vow to “fucking eat your ass”—queer sex literally personifies “the end”: of days and dudes. Queer time predominates in I’m So Excited! when a Spanish airliner with damaged landing equipment must circle endlessly around Toledo in search of a runway. 6 In the meantime, the flamboyantly gay flight crew, headed by Joserra, must curtail panic by making sure passengers remain “entertained and distracted.” With enough booze, pills, and hallucinogens to fill a Jackie Susann novel, the plane ride of the dolls commences

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during which the classic disaster movie convention—the characters’ reactions to catastrophe—serves the purposes of sex farce, drama, and camp parody. I’m So Excited! weds the macho, popular genres of brom-com and disaster movie to the camp-styled sex farce redolent of Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios, 1988). Paul Julian Smith characterizes the style of Almodóvar’s earlier films in terms of a “conspicuous frivolity . . . linked to serious concerns,” the mission to “seek truth in travesty,” and working in “the queer-coded registers of kitsch and camp” (2). I’m So Excited! consistently appears as a camp travesty of Airport; flight attendant Joserra’s affair with married pilot Alex mimics that of stewardess Jacqueline Bisset’s affair with copilot Dean Martin; the deadline of an emergency landing predominates; and, as in Airport 1975, a glamorous star sits among the passengers, although instead of respectable Gloria Swanson, it is a celebrity dominatrix tellingly named Norma. I’m So Excited! additionally employs the idea of, as Keane puts it, “disaster as therapy” (22), a component exemplified in Airport through the protagonists’ romantic-sexual plotlines. I’m So Excited! plays out a similar trope to satirize post-9/11 attitudes, the Spanish financial crisis, and the hypocrisy underpinning post-feminist and post-closet attitudes. Joserra reunites with married pilot Alex in a mile-high-club encounter; Bruna, a psychic virgin, finds a man to deflower her; Norma ravishes hit-man Infante (originally assigned to assassinate her); and the hetero copilot and resident bro Benito engages in steamy sex with gay flight attendant Ulloa. The disaster inspires women to liberate themselves from men, such as Ruth, who spurns the lying, womanizing Ricardo. And disaster provides the mechanism to punish bad patriarchs, such as the corrupt, conservative banker Más, who faces imminent incarceration upon landing. Most extensively, though, the disaster provides the therapeutic platform for characters to validate their queerness, which prompts the resolution of disaster. I’m So Excited! contorts the binary value system structuring 1970s disaster films as well as This Is the End, in which disaster purges the population of perverts and reprobates (Roddick 259–60). The gay lovers Joserra and Alex both prove their “frontier spirit” as the primary heroes confronting calamity. Joserra acts as the plane’s therapist and moral compass, facing catastrophe with a mixture of blunt truth and fabulous distraction. He warns the passengers not to panic about the dangers of an emergency landing with a disturbing, post-9/11 cautionary tale about a passenger mistaken for a terrorist and murdered. He also laces the truth with hallucinogens—the mescaline that he and his flight crew put into the passengers’ cocktails—and showbiz entertainment, his performance with fellow stewards Ulloa and Fajas of “I’m So Excited!” Airline pilot Alex manifests a more traditional version of a disaster movie hero by approximating Dean Martin’s copilot in Airport; sober, strong, and re-

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sponsible, Alex safely lands the plane and then vows to come out to his wife Concha and live with Joserra. The film’s queer, feminist orientation decenters Alex’s patriarchal nobility, though; Joserra reveals that Concha (named after Dietrich’s character in the camp classic Devil Is a Woman) already knows about their relationship and found a female lover. Chipping away at the hierarchical distinctions between gay and straight, feminine and masculine, as well as closeted and out, I’m So Excited! rescues the disaster movie from the conventionally heteronormative constructions of frontier spirit and family. I’m So Excited! establishes that what little structural integrity both the plane and larger society have coincides with the subversion of rigid gender roles and sexual categories, not their restoration. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Benito and Alex’s conversation as they prepare for the hazardous landing. Amid technical talk, Benito nervously confesses that he enjoyed sex with Ulloa and reiterates the anxious query, “Am I becoming bisexual like you?!” Such “straight panic” finally compels Alex to remind Benito about their drunken sexual encounter: “I had to practically pull my dick out of your mouth! Does that answer your question? Because we have to land without full landing gear and I think we should try to concentrate!” Queer causality redefines the disaster narrative and Benito’s bro persona through the correlation of two resolutions: Benito’s acceptance of gay desire and the plane’s safe arrival. The film closes on Benito and Ulloa, at it again, buried in the foam covering the runway to ease the plane’s touchdown, when Benito’s arm rises through the foam and tosses his pilot’s cap in the air victoriously. With echoes of the conclusion of Airport, resolving the disaster and sexualizing the bromance prove therapeutic and liberating. If This Is the End provides closeted spaces of queer, feminist pleasure in satirizing and subverting heteronormative, post-9/11 hegemony, I’m So Excited! outs these delights. In This Is the End, heaven’s bromantic queer time presents a de facto prohibition on sexuality, while the queer time of Armageddon offers sexuality at the most terrible of prices: damnation and the loss of hetero-masculinity. I’m So Excited! challenges these heteronormative regulations; reconfiguring the moral, social, and political meanings of disaster, the film redefines the causality of disaster and the means for resolving it. Activities usually worthy of punishment in the moral universe of disaster movies, such as homosexuality, fornication, and drug use, to say the least of male effeminacy, fill the film’s queer time and contribute to, rather than undermine, the frontier spirit needed to avoid catastrophe.

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WORKS CITED Alilunas, Peter. “Male Masculinity as the Celebration of Failure: The Frat Pack, Women, and the Trauma of Victimization in the ‘Dude Flick.’” Mediascape (Spring 2008). Web. http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Spring08_MaleMasculinity.html. Becker, Ron. “Becoming Bromosexual.” In Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television, edited by Michael DeAngelis, 233–54. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. Print. ———. “Guy Love: A Queer Straight Masculinity for a Post-Closet Era?” In Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics, edited by Glyn Davis and Gary Needham, 121–40. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. Bell-Metereau, Rebecca. “The How-To Manual, the Prequel, and the Sequel in Post-9/ 11 Cinema.” In Film and Television after 9/11, edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon, 142–62. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Print. Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss, 13–31. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. DeAngelis, Michael. Introduction to Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television, edited by Michael DeAngelis, 1–26. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. Print. ———. “Queerness and Futurity in Superbad.” In Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television, edited by Michael DeAngelis, 213–29. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. Print. ———, ed. Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. Print. Dixon, Wheeler Winston, ed. Film and Television after 9/11. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Print. Feil, Ken. Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Print. ———. “From Batman to I Love You, Man.” In Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television, edited by Michael DeAngelis, 165–90. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. Print. Greven, David. “Dude, Where’s My Gender? Contemporary Teen Comedies and New Forms of Masculinity.” Cineaste, Summer 2002, 14–21. Print. Jones, Adrian. “Playing with Himself: James Franco, Hollywood Queer.” In Queer Love in Film and Television, edited by Pamela Demory and Christopher Pullen, 193–203. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. Kakoudaki, Despina. “Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film.” Camera Obscura 17, no. 2 (2002): 109–53. Print. Keane, Stephen. Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe. 2nd ed. London: Wallflower, 2006. Print. Markovitz, Jonathan. “Reel Terror Post 9/11.” In Film and Television after 9/11, edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon, 201–25. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Print. Miller, Margo. “Masculinity and Male Intimacy in Nineties Sitcoms: Seinfeld and the Ironic Dismissal.” In The New Queer Aesthetic on Television, edited by James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner, 147–59. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Print. Negra, Diane. “Structural Integrity, Historical Reversion, and the Post-9/11 Chick Flick.” Feminist Media Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): 51–68. Print. Randell, Karen. “‘It Was Like a Movie’: The Impossibility of Representation in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.” In Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the War on Terror, edited by Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell, 141–52. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print. Robertson, Pamela. Guilty Pleasures. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print. Roddick, Nick. “Only the Stars Survive: Disaster Movies in the Seventies.” In Performance and Politics in Popular Drama, edited by David Bradby, Louis James, and Bernard Sharratt, 243–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Print.

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Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 1990. Print. Smith, Paul Julian. Desire Unlimited. London: Verso, 1994. Print. Weinman, Jenna. “Second Bananas and Gay Chicken.” In Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television, edited by Michael DeAngelis, 29–51. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. Print. Yacowar, Maurice. “The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre.” In Film Genre Reader, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 217–35. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Print.

NOTES 1. White House Down pairs Jamie Fox’s President Sawyer with Channing Tatum’s aspiring Secret Service agent in a battle against ruthless fascists attempting a coup and remains consistent with bromantic gender politics; Tatum’s heroic self-sacrifice for his bro (the president) proves his paternal authority to his estranged daughter, who initially respects the president far more than her father. The World’s End’s man-boy protagonists battle apocalyptic threats, repairing damaged, immature masculinity through acts of heroic self-sacrifice. It’s a Disaster (2013) features thirty-something hipsters holding a Sunday brunch and growing increasingly uncool when the threat of doomsday looms; the much sillier comedy Rapture-Palooza (2013) pits a wily young woman against a lecherous Antichrist attempting to steal her virginity and seal Armageddon. 2. The Supreme Court overturned DOMA just days after the film’s premiere. 3. For discussions of The Sum of All Fears, The Day after Tomorrow, and World Trade Center, see Feil, Keane, Kellner, Markovitz, and Randell. 4. Jones (198–201) makes a similar point about Pineapple Express. 5. Queer S/M sexual practices, despite having introduced “alternative ways to think about the purposes of erotic pleasure” for mainstream straight folks (Becker, “Guy Love” 124–25), have a history of representation as violent and depraved, as in Cruising (1980) and Pulp Fiction (1994). 6. Amid the film’s queering of the disaster narrative, Almodóvar employs queer time to subvert the deadline event of every disaster movie, the climactic spectacle of catastrophe. The film conveys the climactic crash landing through ominous, motionless shots of an abandoned, inactive airport accompanied by the chaotic action sounds of screeching breaks, grinding metal, and sirens.

THIRTEEN The Human Barnyard Rhetoric, Identification, and Symbolic Representation in Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana Elizabeth Lowry

The Rhetoric must lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the War of Nerves, the War. —Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of Motives

Although there is no evidence that the Puerto Rican poet and novelist Giannina Braschi is familiar with Kenneth Burke’s work, her United States of Banana (2011) presents a complex tableau of political and social life that takes on new meaning when read through the lens of Burke’s “Rhetoric.” Burke defines rhetoric according to what he believes it is supposed to do in the world—that is, to bridge social divides and to cultivate a sense of unity among those who might otherwise be at odds. When Burke speaks of the Rhetoric leading us “through the Scramble, the Wrangle . . . the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard,” he means that in order to cope with a potentially difficult situation—particularly a political one—it is necessary to temporarily “identify” with another party and then attempt to understand the situation from that “other” perspective. More specifically, in the Rhetoric of Motives, Burke outlines his theory of identification and consubstantiality: “In being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with a person other than himself. Yet, at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another” 155

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(21). Therefore, consubstantiality can be understood as a way to maintain one’s own identity while also acknowledging and accounting for the subject position of another person. Simply put, according to Burke’s “Rhetoric” if we want to address social problems, we need to take on different— and often contradictory—identifications rather than repudiating what we are ourselves or distancing ourselves from the “other.” Inspired by the events of 9/11, Braschi’s United States of Banana presents a grim—yet colorful—portrait of American neo-imperialism, false-consciousness, and alienation. As such, the book offers its own version of the “Human Barnyard,” making frequent references to animals, including cockroaches, eagles, pigeons, rats, moles, dogs, lambs, rabbits, turtles, cows, bulls, chickens, and pigs. The United States of Banana begins in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and its opening scenes vary from stark realism to the darkly surreal. Although marketed as a novel, the United States of Banana is in fact a mixed genre work: part memoir, part epic poem, part speculative fiction, part polemic, and, at times, a stage play. Braschi, the narrator, is sometimes the protagonist of the story, sometimes not. With this in mind, I argue that reading the United States of Banana through the lens of Burke reveals Braschi’s personal attempts to navigate, negotiate, and transcend the cultural chaos of 9/11. Braschi’s novel maps out the problematic nature of neoliberalism and the policies that she believes precipitated the events of 9/11. Writing from a Latin American perspective, Braschi considers the relationship between the United States and Latin America in the pre- and post-9/11 eras. She speaks of the Latin American experience as being subsumed by Yanqui neoliberal ideology, a view also espoused by historian John Beverly, who states: “Before 9/11, and especially during the Clinton presidency in the 1990s, geopolitically the United States and the neoliberal assumptions of the so-called Washington Consensus were hegemonic in every sphere of Latin American life” (251). But Beverly also argues that after 9/11 “that hegemony begins to fade,” asserting that 9/11 marked a political turn to the right for the United States, which sparked a reactionary turn to the left for Latin America. Beverly asks, “What would be the form of a new Latinamericanism, capable of confronting U.S. hegemony and expressing an alternative future for the peoples of the Americas?” (18). Entertaining similar questions, Braschi suggests that the events of 9/11 contributed toward a shift in Latin American consciousness, also interpreting 9/11 as being emblematic of a “battle of matter and spirit—the battle of the oppressed that are dispossessed—and want to possess— because they feel possessed. And they are possessed of spirit. It is the call of the oppressed to be possessed by something higher than material dispossession” (33). However, much of the United States of Banana suggests that despite this “call of the oppressed” to reimagine their lives, many continue to doggedly adhere to the value systems of the pre-9/11 era. Yanquis in particular are seen to be resistant to reconsidering the central

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tenets of neoliberalism. While Hispanics in Latin America may be responding to 9/11 by critiquing capitalism, Braschi’s work suggests that Hispanics in the United States, particularly those in New York City, remain trapped in outmoded belief systems. Postcolonial subjects are invisible components of the U.S. economy, and faulty postcolonial logics constitute the problematic relationships that the United States has forged on a national level. However, Braschi is trying to do more than criticize and accuse—she attempts to identify with various different subject positions across the political spectrum, emphasizes the need for unity and understanding, and recognizes her own complicity in reifying the social structures that she condemns. For example, following a critique of U.S. imperialism and the harmful psychosocial influence of tourism on her native Puerto Rico, Braschi admits to her audience that she was once one of the very people that she critiques. In Puerto Rico, she lived a privileged life, benefiting from the spoils of imperialism: she too spent time at country clubs and fancy hotels. She ate American food, played tennis, and rubbed shoulders with expatriates and wealthy tourists (248). This privileged identity is as difficult for Braschi to accept and negotiate as that of the quintessential impoverished “Hispanic immigrant.” But how can Braschi account for such conflicting identifications? As a Hispanic immigrant, an ordinary minimum-wage worker, she constructs herself as a “piggybank.” In Braschi’s reckoning, being a piggy bank means a low income, living hand to mouth, and being treated in a manner that suggests an assumption of charity: You think my brain is a piggybank. The only thing you do is throw some coins inside the piggybank of my brain. I hear the coins drop, drop, drop—but there is no water—they drown the stage in tears seven times salt. Even for an eggshell. My brain is a piggybank. Drop your coins and feel happy because you’re contributing to my economy. Fundraiser, you are raising the funds to kill my soul every day a little more. (20)

When she likens the immigrant brain—or even simply the alienated labor of the immigrant—to a piggy bank, Braschi suggests that, as a receptacle for coins (which aren’t “real” money), the piggy bank must be broken once it is full. The worker labors until she is “broken,” only to weep at the discovery that the coins she has accumulated are hardly worth anything at all. Here, Braschi tentatively occupies subject positions that are simultaneously “me” and “not me” in telling stories from the perspective of an unnamed Hispanic immigrant. She does this by symbolically inhabiting the subject position of the low-income worker (the “piggybank”) as well as the subject position of a person profiting from the capitalist system and attaining social status within it (the “cash machine”). The point at which a person is considered to be of worth within the American economy is when she makes the move from being a “piggybank” to a “cash ma-

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chine”—that is, the point at which she is interpreted as contributing to the economy not with her labor but by virtue of her ability to hire and pay others. In her effort to identify with the complementary, yet also contradictory, subject positions of piggy bank and machine, I argue that Braschi engages in what Krista Ratcliffe refers to as “rhetorical listening.” When considering the Burkean concept of identification, Ratcliffe asserts that “rhetorical listening may precede conscious identifications” (19). By “rhetorical listening,” Ratcliffe means a commitment to self-awareness, to understanding how and why we make certain identifications. She goes on to further define rhetorical listening as being a form of interpretation, a form of invention, and “a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture” (1). This definition relates to the rhetorical work of the United States of Banana in that Braschi is constantly trying to negotiate where she belongs. She finds herself identifying with a mainstream capitalist mentality that she also repudiates. In addition, she identifies with the Hispanic immigrant who does not readily fit into the paradigm of a mainstream white, American, capitalist work ethic. As such, Braschi’s identifications are always already troubled, and they often seem to complicate the notion of the “Human Barnyard” more than they come to terms with it—yet Braschi is trying hard to “listen.” Ratcliffe emphasizes that rhetorical listening is a conscious choice, a process of invention that can cultivate a link between the personal and the political without conflating the two. Although we may share political views, what those views mean to us personally within varying individual contexts may be as complex and contested as they often seem to be for Braschi. With respect to the personal and political, Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn ask: “Is it possible to speak in a voice that exceeds the personal, to use a public voice, to launch a political critique in literature? What form can such a literature take, negotiating as it must between the event itself and the dictates of genre, tradition, and the impulse to find an audience?” (308). I contend that reading the United States of Banana in terms of identification and consubstantiation reveals that Braschi projects a voice that “exceeds the personal.” While much of her writing clearly refers to her own experience, Braschi’s work also transcends the personal by addressing a universal problematic of identification. Often this occurs when Braschi moves into second person, addressing the reader directly, assuming that any audience—regardless of heritage or socioeconomic status—will be able to identify with her chicken analogy: You walk in the door like a chicken with the head cut off. You don’t know what you’re doing. You might know what you’re doing. Of course you know what you’re doing. You’re walking. What you don’t know is where you’re going. But at least you’re walking. As the head of

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the chicken with the head cut off I can’t walk. I am lying on the floor— half dead—watching you walk like a chicken with its head cut off. I want to lend you my eyes—so you know where you’re going—but now we are two separate entities. (26)

Here, the decapitated chicken becomes a placeholder for all forms of false consciousness, for all those who are caught up in the “Scramble” of late monopoly capitalism. These chickens are going “to breed more headless chickens” and to indoctrinate others into their ideology, one in which the individual subject appears to have agency but is actually powerless. The decapitated chicken—with a body violently separated from its head—is also an allegory for colonialism: “The colonizer organizes the invasion but doesn’t prepare for the counter-invasion. The colonized moves from the land of the invaded to the land of his invader . . . to infiltrate that new culture and to conquer it with his own culture. Now he is two” (Braschi 45). In this manner, the subaltern internalizes his oppressor, experiencing not only false-consciousness but also double-consciousness and an inevitable crisis of identity. Braschi mentions that upon moving to the “land of his invader” the experience of the colonized becomes “bilingual,” his identity is tied to his language, and he exists in two languages. But the two languages—these two identities—are often in conflict. There is a sense of the self being split, a forced disidentification. The image of the headless chicken walking without knowing where it is going suggests that we are all caught up in a system of compulsive, rather than reflective, action. Braschi’s frequent references to chickens may allude to the controversial Ward Churchill article that appeared in the New York Times on September 12, 2001. In this article, entitled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” Churchill asserts that the attack on the World Trade Center should be recognized as a backlash to corrupt U.S. and European foreign policy in the Middle East. Churchill suggests that if we want to understand why September 11 happened (and to prevent further tragedies of this ilk), we would do well to engage in some selfreflection. For her part, Braschi appears to be engaging in that reflection from a Latin American perspective, considering the casualties of globalization and a free-market economy. However, sharing her perspectives ten years after 9/11 is a judicious move on Braschi’s part: in the years closely following the attack on the World Trade Center, a critique of U.S. imperialism would likely not have been well-received at a time when the United States was widely perceived as having been victimized. For Braschi, to suggest rethinking American political engagement when much of the population was thirsty for revenge hardly seemed prudent. However, as Braschi is well aware, once the emotional turmoil subsides, national— and indeed global—narratives slowly become ossified in the collective consciousness. It is during this time—a time at which the 9/11 narrative

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has not yet been wholly “fixed”—that it becomes necessary to question the assumptions underlying patriotic storytelling. In her own process of storytelling, Braschi is able to retrospectively trace the various nuances of a political climate that helped to spur the post-9/11 Latin American turn toward socialism that Beverly describes. The terrorists, Braschi implies, were successful in that “spectators around the world . . . witnessed the fall of the American Empire on TV. It changed the world’s view of the self-proclaimed superpower. It made the superpower appear powerless. When success and impact come together, that event marks an era. There is a before and an after” (35). For Latin Americans, “post-9/11” could mean a decreased adherence to the central tenets of capitalism and an increased need to consider one’s position as a global citizen, an immigrant, and an expatriate. There is a need to reconsider the meaning of social responsibility and also to consider one’s own life on one’s own terms. Significantly, chickens are subjects of the “crown”—that is, imperialism of one kind or another—who have hitherto been unable to conceive of themselves as having the capacity for selfactualization: “But chickens with their heads cut off are always rushing around stressed and distressed—from responsibilities and duties— schedules—from sunrise to sunset—always counting hours, minutes, and nanoseconds—they have no time to dwell in themselves—or to feel—as a matter of fact—the fact that they have a life—their life is surpassed by their responsibilities to the crown” (Braschi 305). But to whom or what must the chickens be responsible once they recognize that they “have a life”? Chickens are driven by fear and confusion. They are told what to do and how to think. Instead of prompting us to reflect upon ourselves as a people, a nation, and a culture, the events of 9/11 seem only to have forced us further into a state of brainless compulsion. Instead of thinking about who we are and what we are doing, we have become more chicken-like than ever. The trope of decapitation recurs at multiple points in the United States of Banana narrative. Braschi’s first reference to a headless body comes in the novel’s opening sequence where she describes the torso of a businessman killed at the World Trade Center: I saw a torso falling—no legs—no head—just a torso. I am redundant because I can’t believe what I saw. I saw a torso falling—no legs—no head—just a torso—tumbling in the air—dressed in a bright white shirt—the shirt of the businessman—tucked in neatly—under the belt—snuggly fastened—holding up his pants that had no legs . . . and he was dead—dead for a ducat, dead—on the floor of Krispy Kreme— with powdered donuts for a head—fresh out of the oven—crispy and round—hot and tasty. (3)

This surreal image draws us into Braschi’s 9/11 narrative and inducts us into a world in which the head of the businessman, the symbol of reason,

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capital, and control, has been replaced by Krispy Kreme donuts. The donuts indicate what is missing, a loss of organization and meaning. Later, Braschi depicts herself eating these very donuts, ripping off little pieces one by one as if to suggest that it is perfectly natural to feed (albeit metaphorically) on the body parts of other human beings. In this sense, the Krispy Kreme donuts can be likened to a communion wafer. By eating donuts that replace a man’s decapitated head, Braschi attempts to absorb his symbolic power in the same way that a Christian might absorb a wafer. Thus, Braschi addresses the idea of consubstantiation—that is the idea of “being with.” Within the context of a church communion, wafers are eaten as an act of spiritual consubstantiation—a way of connecting with the Christ principle. Similarly, in the United States of Banana, consuming the host in the form of a donut signifies Braschi’s desire for identification and ultimately consubstantiation. But the donut is a vexed symbol. Although it can be likened to a communion wafer and is therefore symbolic of an effort to attain consubstantiality, Braschi also portrays herself as being disconnected from others, consuming donuts while those around her die. Returning to image of the businessman’s torso, Braschi writes: “When the policeman saw the man, he vomited on the stumps of the man’s legs—and I felt the horror— but I ate my donut anyway, thinking:—I’m glad I’m not there, I’m here dunking my donut while others are blown to bits and pieces. Good luck. Keep hope alive” (8). Despite efforts to identify with the man, Braschi cannot. Although she knows she should feel sick, she continues to eat her donut, apparently frustrated at her inability to identify with others—a frustration that masquerades as casual indifference, highlighting the tension between a desire for consubstantiality and its apparent impossibility. Thus, the donut motif in the text symbolizes both satiety and a profound lack. The enforced satiety of capitalism indicates a recognition that we are divided and alienated even from ourselves. We can confront a terrorist attack without really internalizing it because we are empty inside. The donut represents a fantasy of consubstantiality. Burke’s consubstantiality, “signifies a place of bridged differences and common ground, a place from which to act for common cause. . . . Such consubstantiality may be visualized as the shared space of two distinct but interlocking circles” (Ratcliffe 55). But while Ratcliffe envisions Burkean notions of consubstantiality as “interlocking circles,” Braschi’s consubstantiality—adopting the metaphor of the donut—consists of concentric circles. These circles remain distinct, yet one is subsumed by the other. That is, in Braschi’s reckoning, in the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States the desire for consubstantiality is marked by appropriation—one entity encompassing another—rather than bridging or interlocking via dialogue and a sense of shared humanity. For example, toward the end of the novel, Braschi details a scene where tourists are staying at a fictional luxury hotel in Puerto Rico. The

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hotel resembles a glazed donut, with an icy-cold pool in its center. When the people in the swimming pool find that they are drowning, they begin to panic: “But once a tourist opened a door to the earth—they all poured out of that door like pennies and penuries out of a piggybank—and they landed in the sand—felt the warmth of the sea, the sun, the suntan and the clouds” (252). This is the last time a donut image appears in the novel. And this time, the center of the donut is a swimming pool, a place that appears to present an opportunity for unity. However, this pool is uncomfortably cold and is highly exclusive—only people of a certain economic status can afford to stay in the hotel, and the cold water of the pool overwhelms them. The swimmers begin to drown and look for an escape. Upon finding it, they enter an idyllic space—a place of comfort and pleasure and warmth. They pour into this space “like pennies and penuries,” indicating that they may have seemed wealthy but in reality they were not. In the end, their worth amounted to nothing more than that of those who served them. For Braschi, the donut indicates a warped model of identification and consubstantiality—one that must be avoided. Capitalism is immoral because it values the lives of some humans (cash machines) over others (piggy banks). Instead of bridging ideologies between the left and the right, it is possible that 9/11—an opportunity for reflection and change—led only to a widening rift between political ideologies. Ultimately, a belief in American exceptionalism isolated the United States from the rest of the world and contributed to social unrest across the globe. More specifically, this belief in exceptionalism increased the rift between Latin America and the United States, the global north and the global south. The historical moment at which the proverbial chickens come home to roost marks a time when we need to recognize the importance of what Ratcliffe calls “rhetorical listening.” As a practice, rhetorical listening “turns intent back on the listener, focusing on listening with intent to hear troubled identifications instead of listening for intent of an author” (Ratcliffe 46). Although we cannot know the “intent of an author,” we can recognize “troubled identifications” and attempt to relate to them. This is particularly significant to discussions of Braschi, much of whose writing is intended to be read aloud to a live audience. In her public reading of the first section of the United States of Banana, Braschi invites her audience to listen rhetorically, that is, by describing a business man’s decapitation on 9/11, she “turns intent back on the listener.” In physically facing Braschi, listeners are forced to face their own memories of 9/11 and to attend to Braschi’s troubled identifications as well as her efforts to negotiate the complexities of cultural violence, race, and social class within a post-9/11 New York City. When readers or listeners of the United States of Banana are able to experience that complexity along with Braschi, the “meaning of the text” turns into “something much larger than itself, certainly larger than the intent of the speaker/writer, in that rhetorical listening locates a

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text as part of larger cultural logics” (Ratcliffe 46). The larger “cultural logics” that Braschi addresses become a web of polarizing post-9/11 political ideologies. Despite the fact that we want to be consubstantial—to identify with others—we cannot do so to the extent that we would like because of the doctrine that might equals right. When our sense of exceptionalism separates us from one another, language becomes inadequate for us to bridge our differences. Therefore, if language is a condition of identification and identification is a condition of language, then we literally need a new language with which to consider the events of 9/11 if we are to identify with those from whom we have separated ourselves. Like many other 9/11 authors, Braschi brings her own personal representations of 9/11 to bear on the historical record, deliberately blurring the line between the literal and the figurative—for instance, whether or not she actually saw the torso of a businessman land among a constellation of Krispy Kreme donuts is irrelevant. What matters is her symbolic memory, and how she wishes to comment on the problematic of capitalism and identification as well as her own positionality as a Puerto Rican at “Ground Zero”—a site representative of North American imperialism. In writing the United States of Banana, Braschi must negotiate between the events of September 11 itself—as she experienced it literally and symbolically—as well as “the dictates of genre, tradition, and the impulse to find an ‘audience.’” This awareness of the tension between the individual and the collective as well as the personal and the political spurs Braschi to resist the “dictates of genre” and to challenge fixed meaning, in an effort to communicate that September 11 was at its foundation “incommensurable, inaccessible, and incomprehensible” (Keniston and Quinn 308). After all, “no one wants 9/11 to be misrepresented, politicized, coopted, or distorted. Yet it seems difficult not to do just this” (Keniston and Quinn 206). I would argue that it is not only difficult but also impossible “not to do just this,” because of the context-driven nature of how we make meaning. Keniston and Quinn address problems of potential misrepresentation and politicization by claiming that the meanings of 9/11 are not—and should never be—fixed. It is essential for many different representations to come to light, for a multiplicity of stories to be told and to become part of our cultural memory. In a similar vein, Braschi’s multigenre “novel” takes on a series of distinct forms that would not immediately designate it as being part of any one recognizable genre. Braschi communicates the problematic of singular representation by resisting formal genre conventions, thus refusing to fix the very shape of her text. Further, Braschi also makes use of extensive wordplay and puns, suggesting that contested meanings of individual words (or what Burke refers to as “logomachy”) are at the locus of a cultural confusion that results in disidentification but also that a lack of fixed meaning or dominant narrative is (ironically) what makes it possible for us to come together. Braschi and Burke write about times of great social unrest and the

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pressures to conform to a single worldview or narrative, but all the while they promote not the absorption of one culture into another, rather the willingness of one culture to attempt to deploy the tactics of “rhetorical listening” to understand other perspectives and to negotiate between them. We find ways to identify by listening, by trying to understand what people, places, and politics are trying to tell us about who we are and how we live our lives. We do this by recognizing that we are unwittingly part of the same Scramble and how the pressure under which we live, the “push and pull,” inevitably leads to war and division, not only with others but also within ourselves. WORKS CITED Beverley, John. Latinamericanism after 9/11. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. AZW File. Braschi, Giannina. United States of Banana. Las Vegas: AmazonCrossing, 2011. AZW File. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives: A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkley, CA: Berkley University Press, 1969. Print. Ground Zero: Part I of the “United States of Banana.” Performed by Giannina Braschi. N.d. Youtube. Web. Keniston, Ann, and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. Literature after 9/11. New York: Routledge, 2008. AZW File. Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Print.

FOURTEEN The Pain and Prison of Post-9/11 Parenting in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom Megan Cannella

Post-9/11 parenthood is a practice in surveillance and preservation. Parents lust after the ability to be in constant contact with their children as a means to protect children from any possible harm. The want to simply protect one’s children morphs into a compulsion to monitor and track the child’s every movement. The ability to raise well-adjusted children is no longer the prize. The post-9/11 parent, often called the helicopter parent, must also be his or her child’s friend in order to be considered a success. Andy Braner, writer for the Huffington Post, discusses this a bit further in his article, “Soccer Mom, Helicopter Mom, Snow Plow Mom,” 1 explaining, “This title began rising in popularity in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. . . . It’s used to refer to moms who take an abnormal interest in the safety, security and success of every part of their child’s development” (Braner). The helicopter parent becomes more prevalent in the post-9/11 culture because parents are overwhelmed by the fact that their children, and the parents themselves, are exposed to the kind of potentially catastrophic events from which one cannot reasonably be shielded. Parents are realizing that their authoritative and protective powers are severely limited by global risks that had previously been largely ignored or denied. Focus has shifted from being disciplinarian to best friend, a shift perfectly illustrated in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010). Franzen shows his reader the ramifications that post-9/11 parenting has on both parents and children. Franzen’s novel is crucial to understanding today’s redefined family unit. Freedom speaks to the fact that families today have destruc165

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tive priorities when compared to the priorities of families a few decades ago. Freedom exemplifies parenting that has no boundaries but rather seeks approval from the children that should be disciplined instead of impressed. Patty Berglund’s relationship with her son, Joey, typifies the trend of parents trading their emotional and social well-being for their child(ren)’s affection. Post-9/11 children, as Franzen shows us through Joey, are ill-equipped to interact with and negotiate the risk and mortality of the post-9/11 cultural terrain in which they are being raised because, throughout their adolescence, they are not being tasked with confronting such realities: “Growing up in St. Paul, Joey Berglund had received numberless assurances that his life was destined to be a lucky one” (Franzen 247). In Freedom, the suffocating, myopic focus with which parents are fawning over their children, in an attempt to save them from the unpredictable and unrelenting risks of post-9/11 culture, becomes learned behavior by their children. Patty, the matriarch of the Berglund family showcased in Freedom, sees parenthood as a chance to redeem herself, in a distinctly post-9/11 way. Patty, as opposed to other matriarchs, such as Enid Lambert of Franzen’s The Corrections, is not trying to form and preserve a perfect family. She is not trying to validate herself through the success her children achieve. Her success as a mother is determined by her ability to be beloved by her children, to have her investment of constant and suffocating attention be returned with interest. When Joey and his sister, Jessica, are young, Patty and Walter take on traditional roles, with Walter going to work to earn the family’s money and Patty staying home and focusing on all things domestic and maternal. This is the life Patty had dreamed of, and as always, Walter wanted to see Patty happy. Patty and Walter Berglund distinguish themselves as distinctly post-9/11 parents and spouses as they continue to establish a type of emotionally fueled Stockholm syndrome–inspired relationship with their children. Lenore Skenazy explains, “There’s been this huge cultural shift . . . where people think children need constant and total supervision. This shift is not rooted in fact. It’s not rooted in any true change. It’s imaginary. It’s rooted in irrational fear” (Friedersdorf). The constant barrage of attention and devotion that is forced upon the children of post-9/11 helicopter parents holds the expectation that it is reciprocal, but through the lens of Freedom’s Joey, we learn that not only is this attention not always returned in kind, but also it can actually be detrimental to a child’s development. While Patty and Walter may adopt traditional gender roles within their marriage, their parenting is anything but traditional. Jennifer Senior explores this paradigm shift, explaining in her book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, that, after the end of World War II, “the family economy was no longer built on a system of reciprocity, with parents sheltering and feeding their children, and children, in return, kicking something back into the family till. The relationship became

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asymmetrical. Children stopped working, and parents worked twice as hard. Children went from being our employees to our bosses” (Senior 9). Senior continues explaining that “the way most historians describe this transformation is to say that children went from ‘useful’ to ‘protected’” (Senior 9). In keeping with this assessment, Patty ensures that her children are protected and obsesses over her son, Joey. In her quest to be the perfect, involved, supportive mother, Patty becomes an adoring fan of Joey’s. “And Patty was undeniably very into her son. Though Jessica was the more obvious credit to her parents. . . . In her [Patty’s] chuckling, confiding, self-deprecating way, she spilled out barrel after barrel of unfiltered detail about her and Walter’s difficulties with him. She was like a woman bemoaning her gorgeous jerky boyfriend” (Franzen 8). Her infatuation with him is discussed often within the novel and within critical discourse of Franzen’s depiction of families. Patty and Walter are very much tied to their children, and they, as a couple, struggle with Patty’s need to define herself as a post-9/11 parent, giving all of herself to her children. However, in giving herself completely to her children, she deprives both herself and her children of autonomy, something that, in the protective sanitization of post-9/11 culture, is a rare commodity. Eventually, Patty has no identity when separated from her role as mother, wife, and daughter. So when she is sacrificing for the sake of her children, she is really only sacrificing for herself, because the two are one and the same. Patty thrives on the attention she gives her son and her role as a homemaker. However, as mentioned before, Patty’s lack of autonomy differs from the stereotypical hovering mother and is distinct to her post-9/11 parental status. She is not interested in her family bringing her outside attention and approval. She is consumed by the drive to be accepted by her children. If she can adequately protect and care for her children, specifically Joey, then she will be protected. While this is typical of post-9/11 parents struggling to reconcile the elevated risks of their post-9/11 reality, Patty takes this parental position early on in her maternal career. Her near-predatory need to protect and be accepted by her children increases exponentially after the 9/11 terror attacks. It is as if the post-9/11 culture allows Patty to fulfill her self-appointed maternal destiny. While many critics of helicopter parents argue that the children of helicopter parents lack autonomy and critical problem-solving skills, so do the parents, as helicopter parents most often find their identity and push to solve problems in relation to their child. Patty’s efforts to be the perfect mother are not merely contained to her own children. She strives to have her entire persona exude maternal glory. Self-proclaimed helicopter parents wear the title as a badge of honor. They are taking the actions needed, no matter how extreme, unwanted, or unwarranted, to make sure that their children succeed. However, there remains the question of whether these actions were a persona or if they were Patty’s truest self. Merrie Paulsen, a neighbor of the Berglunds in St.

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Paul, is keenly aware of Patty’s muddled identity. Merrie is sure that “if you were to scratch below the nicey-nice surface you might be surprised to find something rather hard and selfish and competitive and Reaganite in Patty” (Franzen 8). Patty’s identity is so thoroughly obfuscated that even she cannot tell where the act ends and she begins. Patty’s joy is supposedly gained through her efforts to serve and raise her family. It is this obsessive focus that allows Patty and other post-9/11 parents to extract joy from their identity as parent, despite the actual outcomes of their efforts. Senior explains that this kind of singular focus and the resulting joy is an example of what psychiatrists refer to as “flow.” Essentially, this “flow” is when someone is so absorbed with the task they are working on that the rest of the world fades away and this person is powered by his or her own sense “of agency, of mastery” (Senior 30). She continues, explaining, “The paradoxical thing about flow is that it is often marked by the absence of feeling, experienced nonetheless as a form of undiluted bliss. That’s what makes flow one of the most beguiling and equal-opportunity parts of our emotional lives” (Senior 30). No matter what is going on, joy and satisfaction can be achieved by immersing one’s self in some beloved task; for Patty, this task is parenting. However, when Joey leaves for college, exposing him to the global risks that Patty was determined to insulate him from, for both Joey’s good and her own, he works hard to create an irrevocable cold distance with his mother, as “everything in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sorts of talks that they’d had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it” (Franzen 258). The years Patty spent establishing her identity as a parent are undercut when Joey not only cuts himself off from his mother but also literally plunges himself into the very kind of danger that is the genesis for the post-9/11 version of the helicopter parent. In his book Jane Smiley, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo: Narratives of Everyday Justice, Jason Polley explains how the family structure within the Berglund household sets Freedom apart from Franzen’s other family dramas. Polley writes, “Before Freedom, his families always grew bigger by one member and older by half a generation. The threat to the stability of the family unit increases with number as with time. Family members develop their own personal narratives as they age. Individual storylines counter act the cohesiveness of the family” (Polley 123). Due to the parenting model championed and enforced by Patty, the Berglund family is not torn apart by growth but rather by deterioration. The members of this family do not develop personal narratives that detract from the cohesiveness of the family’s narrative. Rather, each member of the Berglund family has his or her storyline intertwined with the storylines of everyone else

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in the family. The way Patty and Walter have constructed their family ensures that there is no point at which they can fully separate themselves from each other. Even at their worst, riddled with disappointment and disillusionment, the family cannot fully separate. They are forever linked, no matter how tenuous the bond may be. Ingrid Arnet Connidis supports this reading, stating, “Yet although the partners in this novel don’t give up, neither do they commit deeply to each other or their children. The family ties of Freedom reveal the underlying contradiction of valuing an institution that fails family members and does not involve a deep commitment by partners to each other” (309). While Connidis suggests that Patty and Walter do not commit deeply to their children, that is only marginally true. Both parents are striving to connect as deeply as possible, but they are not equipped to do so. As scholar Laura Oswald asserts, “Whatever form it takes, family provides the earliest experiences of nurturing, security, and socialization. It provides a springboard for entry into the broader community and a roadmap for navigating the vast network of interpersonal and institutional relations comprising society” (309). Patty and Walter were each working from a deficit to begin with, and unwillingness to acknowledge this “weakness” contributes to their decision to form an unsteady family unit, as that is all they know. Due to her upbringing, Patty is confident that there cannot be a balance between work and family, because her mother, Joyce, did not respect that balance. Joyce did not wonder if she could really pull off the acrobatics required to excel as breadwinner and homemaker. Joyce overestimated the scope of her children’s autonomy, or she underestimated the need for hands-on parenting. Patty sees herself becoming the opposite of her mother as a type of salvation. Connidis asserts that Patty’s want to be a “really, really great mom” is an act of rebellion against the way that she was raised: “Her [Patty’s] resentment at being ignored by a too busy mother leads Patty to be a stay-at-home mother, as she views the melding of a successful career and good mothering as an unattainable contradiction (a nod to the structured ambivalence of gender relations and the social domains of work and family)” (307). Now Patty’s suffering has a purpose, and that purpose is to fuel her quest to become the perfect mother. As she strives to rectify her experience with family through her devotion to her children, Patty cannot successfully do this as her son cuts her off and plunges, almost blindly, into the dangerous post-9/11 terrain that she worked so hard to guard him against. This is especially clear when Joey tells Patty that he will be spending Christmas in New York instead of going home to the Midwestern safety bubble that Patty had devoted years to creating. While the Berglund family home is in St. Paul, Minnesota, it is clear that they exist within the shelter of suburbia, where Joey is a celebrity and cannot fail. Joey’s success is near guaranteed in St. Paul because he is allowed to operate under the guise of a persona much

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larger than his own. The Berglund’s neighbor reflects that “it was hardly surprising that Joey should be confused about the distinction between children and adults—his own mother seemed to suffer from some confusion about which of the two she was” (Franzen 9). As Patty witnesses Joey immerse himself in the challenging and uncertain culture of post-9/ 11 New York City, she is left helpless to protect and promote her prized possession. Patty cannot understand the rejection from her son, and she certainly cannot make sense of the fact that he’d rather be in the compromised space of a post-9/11 New York, as opposed to with a family that Patty had worked so hard to make perfect for Joey. As the audience sees Patty increasingly drown herself in the role of mother and her marriage with Walter dissolve, Connidis asserts, “Struggles with the institution of marriage create ambivalence that carries over into intergenerational relations” (309). Just as Patty rebels against the type of mother Joyce is, Jessica, Patty’s daughter, unequivocally decides that she will not follow Patty’s matriarchal model. When discussing her parents’ fragmented relationship with Richard, Jessica confesses, “I feel bad for her . . . whenever I’m not being mad at her. She’s so smart, and she never really made anything of herself except being a good mom. The one thing I know for sure is I’m never going to stay home full-time with my kids” (Franzen 379). Jessica and Patty both assume that if they do not cast off any evidence that their adult life has been influenced by their respective mothers, they are destined to duplicate the kind of childhoods that they each had. The generational pendulum of parenthood continues to swing broadly and inflicts lasting wounds regardless of which end it is on. Connidis suggests that “ambivalent sentiments are at the heart of parent–child relations in Freedom. Regardless of how they are treated by their parents and regardless of resolutions to reject the parents who rejected them, children of all ages continue to yearn for their parents’ love” (Connidis 308). Even as Patty and Walter marry and become parents, they continue to struggle with the tortured relationships they had with their respective parents. The neglectful childhoods that they experienced frame their marriage and their journey through parenthood. As explored in the article “Family Instability and Children’s Early Problem Behavior,” “Specifically, the family instability that children experience before entering this new social institution is presumed to affect how well they adjust, both socially and emotionally, upon entry” (Cavanagh and Huston 552). Franzen makes it clear that neither Patty nor Walter adjusts much, if at all, to their marriage. Moreover, Patty and Walter’s marriage seems to only facilitate their helicopter parenting, despite the fact that they are often operating in a mutually exclusive way. While children are dependent, legally and otherwise to their parent(s), the helicopter parent is equally dependent on his or her child. The argument that this form of parenting leaves the child unable to critically negotiate the world, as well

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as his or her own emotions, is a fairly common and well-represented point of view. For example, “USA Today has reported, and researchers from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, say the ‘high involvement, low autonomy granting and presence of emotional support in the relationship’ reflects ‘a uniquely distinguishable approach to parenting’” (Oeth). The fact that Patty and Walter cannot adjust to new social institutions means that they have also deprived their son of this skill set. Upon hearing news of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Joey is unable to process the magnitude of the change that would result. “Try as he might, in the weeks and months that followed, he could not recall what he’d been thinking as he’d crossed the semideserted campus. It was highly uncharacteristic of him to be so clueless, and the deep chagrin he’d then experienced, on the steps of the Chemistry Building, became the seed of his intensely personal resentment of the terrorist attacks” (Franzen 248). Due to his upbringing, he cannot appropriately adapt to the changing world. He lacks the capacity to comprehend the grieving nation that surrounds him. In the days after 9/11, everything suddenly seemed extremely stupid to Joey. It was stupid that a “Vigil of Concern” was held for no conceivable practical reason, it was stupid that people kept watching the same disaster footage over and over. . . . He felt as if he’d bumped his old Discman against a wall and, . . . he couldn’t make it stop playing. (Franzen 248)

Nevertheless, despite the shaky foundation of their family and marriage, Patty and Walter do not falter publicly. From the beginning, Patty wanted a perfect domestic life, and that is the image that she has cultivated and maintains. The Berglunds represented more of a social movement on their block, as opposed to a parental presence. They are gentrifying parenthood: “For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee” (Franzen 5). Franzen creates the Berglunds to be a gentrifying force in their neighborhood. Patty and by association Walter are a stark contrast to their neighbor Carol. 2 “By the late eighties, Carol was the only non-gentrifiers left on the block. She smoked Parliaments, bleached her hair, made lurid talons of her nails, fed her daughter heavily processed food, and came home very late on Thursday nights (‘That’s Mom’s night out,’ she explains, as if every mom had one)” (Franzen 7). Part of what defines the post-9/11 parenting (both those whose children were born into the post-9/11 culture and those whose children lived the transition between life on September 10, 2001, and life on September 11, 2001) is an increased social awareness. In order to protect children from an increasingly dangerous and, perhaps, even predatory world, parents need to be on constant alert for any and all risks, under the guise that “you never know.”

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Patty was preparing for this world reality before it became the cultural norm, and this contributed significantly to her acrimonious relationship with Carol. Carol and the Berglunds are not only both raising children in a post-9/11 world, but also they are both essentially raising Joey in a post-9/11 world, and the expectation from all of them is to coddle and protect at all costs. When Joey refuses to come back to Minnesota and spend Thanksgiving with Carol and her family, Carol lashes out: “Leave Connie out of it for a minute. You and I lived together like a family for almost two years. I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I’m starting to get an idea of what you put your mom through. Seriously. I never understood how cold you are until this fall” (Franzen 253). While Carol had started the conversation with Joey talking about his unfair treatment of her daughter, Connie, by the end of the conversation, Carol’s grievance is that of a jilted mother, mimicking the pain and rejection Joey typically reserves for Patty. In direct contrast to the feelings Joey often evokes in Patty, and to a lesser extent Carol, the expected result of being a parent is a kind of joy and satisfaction with not only who and what children grow up to be but also the entire parenting process. Markella B. Rutherford discusses this quest for happy children in her article, “The Social Value of Self-Esteem,” stating, “Despite the exaggerated claims of difference in popular representations of the parenting wars, a common theme of building children’s self-esteem is evident as a cornerstone of contemporary American parenting practices” (408). This can be seen clearly, and at times tragically, in Freedom, where Patty Berglund’s struggles and sacrifices for her children end up doing more harm than good to her children and her marriage. After Walter and Patty separate and she is all but estranged from her prized Joey, Patty scrambles to make amends. “Her mainstay, of course, is Jessica. . . . Patty is rigorously careful not to overdo it and drown her with need. Jessica is a working dog, not a show dog like Joey. . . . Jessica had made a project of fixing up her mother’s life” (566). For years, Patty inadvertently tore her family apart in an attempt to protect them from the perils beyond her maternal scope, and in the end, this destroyed her. Her destruction opens a door for her family to heal. As Patty brings her autobiography to an end, she reflects that “if she could somehow be with Walter again, and feel secure in his love again, and get up from their warm bed in the morning and go back to it at night knowing that she’s his again, she might finally forgive Connie and become sensible of the qualities that everybody else finds so appealing in her” (569). Patty acknowledges that if she properly aligns herself and her affections with her husband, as opposed to her son, she will be able to appreciate her daughter-in-law, which is the key to a good relationship with Joey, her goal for as long as she or the audience can remember. Patty’s attempts at reparations at the end of the novel mirrors Joey’s desperation to make amends when his business dealings becomes destructive.

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As Patty strives for the perfect family, she is constantly trying to create happiness and security, rather than realizing that these are things that must be cultivated from within the individual, as opposed to something thrust upon a person from an outside source. This preoccupation with the happiness of one’s child and this child-centric family model is a fairly new cultural construct. In the wake of 9/11, our culture’s misplaced enthusiasm for the child-centric family model has increased, and as shown in Franzen’s problematic and fragile Berglund family, families are actually becoming less happy and more unstable as a result. As so much of this child-cetricism is born out of an overwhelming fear of unimaginable terror, falling short of the helicopter parent’s goal of raising happy, safe children leaves Patty frustrated and broken. Joey resents this, unable to recognize his complacent participation. “Joey’s feeling of bereavement was giving way to irritation, because, no matter how much she [Patty and, to a lesser extent, Carol] denied that she was doing it, she couldn’t seem to help reproaching him. These moms and their reproaches, there was no end to it. He called her for a little support, and the next thing he knew, he was falling short of providing support to her” (Franzen 260). However, the Berglunds are not alone; the idea of happy children is an elusive and hard-to-quantify goal of many post-9/11 parents. Rutherford explores this, writing: Self-esteem has not always been the primary measure of good parenting. This new cultural development represents a particular context and set of conditions that are unique to a particular class position in a global, knowledge economy. Professional-class parents who are anxious about their own prospects for continued success in a risky economy turn toward emotional capital as a necessary supplement to educational and extra-curricular success to ensure generational reproduction of class advantages. (408)

One of the hallmarks of the modern Western parent is the drive to instill elusively pure happiness in their children instead of teaching skills that will ultimately help children to develop useful characteristics, skills, and, ultimately, autonomy. Amy Chua reflects on raising her own children, “I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest in the future” (Chua 97). However, as is well documented, Chua’s outlook is not commonly held among post-9/11 parents. Joey, as an unanticipated side effect of Patty’s coddling, demonstrates an immature version of Chua’s philosophy. He is solely focused on his success, as Chua hopes for her daughters. He feels that he can easily profit from the war and that this is his way to succeed in a post-9/11 culture. The realization that he is not infallible, as he had long been led to believe by the mothers in his life, leaves him paralyzed and unclear on how to rectify the catastrophic miscalculation he had made. “But he could see now that nobody else could advise him what to do, whether to blow the whistle and suffer the conse-

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quence or stay mum and keep the money, and that nobody else could absolve him. . . . It was to his strict, principled father that a full accounting needed to be made. He’d been battling him all his life, and now the time had come to admit he was beaten” (Franzen 469–70). Much like Patty does at the end of the novel, Joey is forced to bite the proverbial bullet and return to Walter in order to save himself. As Chua discusses the shortcomings of Western parenting, she argues that “Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about the way their kids turned out” (Chua 51). One of the reasons that Chua asserts that this happens is because Western parents are not focused enough on their overall expectations for their children. They are too preoccupied with their children being happy. Happy is being used as a barometer of success in terms of child development, and Chua sees this as a huge disservice to our children and society. She writes, “I’ve noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children’s self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are not-withstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children’s psyches” (51). Chua’s point is quite well taken when considering how Walter reflects on Joey’s troubles with LBI: 3 “However arrogantly and greedily Joey had behaved, it seemed very harsh to ask a twenty-year-old kid with problematic parents to take full moral responsibility and endure a public smearing, maybe even prosecution” (Franzen 501). Even when Joey is an adult, Walter is driven to absolve Joey of responsibility and shield him from the problematic outcomes of Joey’s interaction with post-9/11 realities that he could not fully comprehend. The goal of all of the parents discussed here, fictional or not, is to successfully do what is best for their children. Each generation is trying to do better than and break the detrimental cycles of the previous generation. As society continues to negotiate the often treacherous terrain of post-9/11 living, it can be hard to draw the line between reasonably cautious and overkill. This line is even harder to define for parents. Parents often describe the uncontrollable need they have to make sure that their child is safe, that their child is happy, and that their child succeeds. No one wants to see the world hurt or defeat their child. But is a child’s autonomy an appropriate price to pay for any of these parental needs? Should parents obliterate their child’s agency so that they can give their child the life they wanted and so that they can be the kind of parent that they wish they had had? Franzen’s story of the Berglund family would suggest that a child’s autonomy, or agency, is not an appropriate sacrifice because it inevitably results in the loss of the parent’s identity as well. While these sacrifices are often made with the best of intentions, as are

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most of a helicopter parent’s actions, Freedom is a call for parents to consider the long-term effects of parenting on not only the child but also on the parent. Allowing a child autonomy does not have to undermine parental influence or power. Additionally, not exclusively devoting one’s life to his or her child(ren) does not automatically result in one being a substandard or neglectful parent. Franzen’s Freedom illustrates the tricky and hazardous terrain of parenthood and family balance, and to be successful, the novel and research all suggest that balance is essential for both parent and child to be able to develop independent and meaningful identities. WORKS CITED Braner, Andy. “Soccer Mom, Helicopter Mom or Snow Plow Mom?” Huffington Post, April 24, 2014. Web. Cavanagh, Shannon, and Aletha C. Huston. “Family Instability and Children’s Early Problem Behavior.” Social Forces 85, no. 1 (2006): 551–81. Project Muse. Web. Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print. Connidis, Ingrid Arnet. “Ambivalence in Fictional Intergenerational Ties: The Portrayal of Family Life in Freedom.” Journal of Family Theory and Review 3, no. 4 (December 2011): 305–11. Print. Franzen, Jonathan. Freedom. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Print. Friedersdorf, Conor. “Working Mom Arrested for Letting Her 9-Year-Old Play Alone at Park.” Atlantic, July 15, 2014. Web. July 15, 2014. Oeth, Annie. “No-Fly Zone for Helicopter Parents.” Clarion-Ledger, April 26, 2014. Web. Oswald, Laura. “Branding the American Family: A Strategic Study of the Culture, Composition and Consumer Behavior of Families in the New Millennium.” Journal of Popular Culture 37, no. 2 (2003): 309–35. Print. Rutherford, Markella B. “The Social Value of Self-Esteem.” Society 48, no. 45 (September 2011): 407–12. MasterFILE Premier. Web. Senior, Jennifer. All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. New York: HarperCollins, 2014. Print.

NOTES 1. Braner defines soccer moms as those who drive their children to so many activities that they take on the role of chauffer as opposed to parent. Snow plow moms are defined as those moms who are pushing their children to success and actively removing obstacles from their child’s way, so that the child can succeed. With the latter type of parenting, children are not given the opportunity to experience failure, nor are they allowed to develop the skills to overcome these failures. 2. Carol’s daughter Connie becomes the girlfriend and eventual wife of Joey. For a brief time, when rebelling against his parents during high school, Joey moves in with Connie and her family. His unstable relationship with Connie mimics not only his relationship with Patty but also Patty’s relationship with Walter. 3. LBI is the generic “oilfield-services giant which, like its archrival Halliburton, had expanded into one of the country’s leading defense contractors under the administrations of Reagan and the elder Bush” (Franzen 319). Both Walter and Joey struggle

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with the temptation of LBI, to various degrees, throughout the novel. Franzen never elaborates on what LBI stands for so as to have it more aptly represent an anonymous, monopolizing corporate entity.

FIFTEEN How to Get to 9/11 Teju Cole’s Melancholic Fiction Ariela Freedman

History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of History, I am what belies it, destroys it for the sake of my own history (impossible for me to believe in ‘witnesses’; impossible, at least, to be one). —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 65

On May 16, 2014, in anticipation of the opening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the Nigerian American writer and photographer Teju Cole tweeted: “Not what you wish to remember, but what insists on being remembered. Looking out on dark water and suddenly seeing a ship slip by” (8:28 a.m.). A few minutes after the first tweet, he added, “Not ready to enter another intense spell of remembering around Ground Zero. Not ready. But I can feel it moving into view” (8:36 a.m.). In the conversation that followed, Cole elaborated further on the relationship between memory, narrative, and 9/11 by referencing his first novel, Open City: “What I tried to do in OC was to literally write ‘about’ it. Circumstantially, circumambulatorily. Still hesitant to get any closer” (8:57 a.m.). Cole closes his thread with a final observation, “Wouldn’t want to go there with anyone who doesn’t have my exact blend of skepticism, grief, and impatience. In other words, I must go alone” (9:23 a.m.). Cole’s ambivalent representation of 9/11 in Open City embodies this “exact blend” as he oscillates between cynicism and sadness in his representation of a lonely antihero in post- 9/11 New York. 177

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Cole’s fleeting meditation, brief as it was, had a potentially vast audience. Cole, whose first novel, Open City (2012), won the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award in 2012, has been a pioneer in the new genre of Twitter literature. With more than 180,00 Twitter followers—an astonishing number for a writer of literary fiction—his acerbic and poetic tweets self-consciously belong to the history of the literary fragment, from its beginnings in Heraclitus through romanticism, modernism, and postmodernity. Indeed, two of the books his narrator is reading in Open City—Peter Altenberg’s Telegrams of the Soul and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida—are deliberately fragmentary works, written in what Altenberg called “telegram style” (8), a terseness that anticipates Cole’s twitterature. In this exchange, Cole was repeating something he had said in numerous interviews—that Open City was his attempt to write “about” 9/11 but that writing “about” 9/11 requires a complicated and indirect approach. Open City shuttles between insistence and repression, address and deferral, in order to create a “circumstantial and circumambulatory” approach. In Open City, Cole attempts what he calls on Twitter “[Writing as transit visa through the impossible]” (May 12) as he navigates the obscene responsibility of writing about trauma. Cole’s pensive, flaneurial novel is an anti-spectacular and deliberately melancholic attempt to navigate the double bind of the need to represent and the taboo of the unrepresentable. As Cole writes in those same inhibiting square brackets, “[Whatever concerns the pain of others is impossible writing made briefly possible. After lightning, night is still night.]” (May 11). In Cloning Terror: The War of Images from 9/11 to the Present (2010), W. J. T. Mitchell points out, “All metaphors and images are, in a fairly straightforward sense, ‘errors’” (xvii). When these errors harden into facts—like the War on Terror—they shift from words into political agents, “operative forces in sociopolitical reality” (xvii). Terrorism, Mitchell writes, relies on “spectacular symbolic acts, the creation of images that traumatize their beholders” (12). If terrorism is the art of spectacle, then we can understand Cole’s muted mode of understatement and obliquity as resistance to the replication of trauma. Cole’s anti-spectacular novel refuses the dominant tropes of 9/11—in contrast to DeLillo, Eisenberg, and Spiegelman, he does not show us the towers in their glory or in their fall, just the black hole of the demystified construction pit. Open City has no falling man, no collapsing towers, no bodies, no acts of strenuous heroism, no terrorists, no patriots, and nary an evildoer. In a much-cited 2009 essay in American Literary History titled “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis,” Richard Gray faults American fiction for domesticating the crisis of 9/11. “All life here is personal,” he writes of the scenarios of post-9/11 American fiction, rejecting the typically American protagonists, the domestic miseen-scène, and the personal narratives of the novels he discusses. Gray argues that mediations of 9/11 through variations on the sentimental and

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domestic fail to meet the formal and political challenges of processing the event in more ambitious, inclusive, and radical terms. His critique is as much a political as an aesthetic one. Gray calls for a political, transnational, and transcultural response. The US has become, more than ever, a border territory in which different cultures meet, collide, and in some instances collude with each other. There is the threat of the terrorist, but there is also the fact of a world that is liminal, a proliferating chain of borders, where familiar oppositions—civilized and savage, town and wilderness, “them” and “us”—are continually being challenged, dissolved, and reconfigured. (134)

Michael Rothberg’s response to Gray in the same journal echoes this diagnosis of aesthetic and political failure. Rothberg proposes an additional response to the fictive “paralysis” (Gray’s term) not only through attention to America’s borderland cultures and immigrant literature but also through a “centrifugal literature of extraterritoriality.” This new literature would imagine “how US citizenship looks and feels beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, both for Americans and for others” in order to create “the great extraterritorial literature of our new age of war and terror” (158). In 2009, when Gray and Rothberg published their critiques, Cole had not yet published Open City—a novel that in many ways answers their call. But this in itself points to a problem in their analysis. Surely, their critique of the limitations of American fiction in relation to 9/11 is premature. As Cole tweeted, “These days, ‘too soon’ is a punchline. But when I see anything about 9/11, my first reaction is still to look away and think, ‘too soon’” (May 16). Cole’s book is precisely the kind of extraterritorial novel Gray and Rothberg demand, attentive to the push and pull of American power, the beautiful lie of its foundational claim to freedom and the paradox of its pursuit of liberty through new imperial wars and a renewed exclusion of the stranger. But Cole’s book is written in a spirit of humility that rejects the prescription of Gray and Rothberg’s calls and refuses the antithesis between personal and political, domestic and radical, conventional and subversive. In an interview with the Hindu, Cole said, It is very difficult to be responsible about disaster because once you’re in a position to write about it means you’ve actually survived; you have your brain intact. . . . Life shocks us into silence. So I wanted to fight back and reclaim a space for a kind of ethical imagination of disaster . . . that could only be done through an indirect eye. You know, when you’re weeping the world is blurry. It’s not sharp. So I’m highly suspicious of clarity when it comes to grief.

Cole’s mobilization of the indirect eye is also a mobilization of the indirect “I”—the self held at a distance—and is a rejection of the political

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utility of tragedy, the call to clear and immediate response. His understanding of the ethical imagination of disaster is one marked at every point by limitation. To have survived is to have already been compromised as a witness; there are no witnesses to the Ground Zero of the tragedy, the experience of obliteration. In response, Cole refuses clarity, echoing Wittgenstein’s aphorism 71, which claims that sometimes a blurry picture is exactly what we require. Cole’s book is constitutively and deliberately soft-edged. Cole’s answer to the problem of speaking about the suffering of others is not to reject the personal but to mobilize it. What Gray sees as a flaw Cole employs as a necessary strategy. Asked by the interviewer how to “get to 9/11” he responded: By making it personal and having one person testify to his own experience and leaving it there. By not speaking about somebody else’s experience. In a sense, we all own it. You didn’t have to be there to own it. . . . It just tells you that Julius and the people he meets are so shuddering from the effect of something; 9/11 in part, but also the long echo of history and erasure in general.

Open City is not unusual in its adoption of the first-person voice but is distinctive in its insistence on 9/11 as inscribed in a history of repeated and effaced traumas. If Cole calls attention to 9/11, it is in part to call attention to those submerged and lesser-known histories. Open City tells the story of a half-Nigerian, half-German psychiatric resident named Julius, living in New York City halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Cole’s book opens with a leisurely stroll. “And so,” he writes in the first sentence as if resuming a conversation, “when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city” (3). To say that Cole is Proustian is not to generically indicate a writer interested in memory; it is rather to point to the way that Cole mimics Proust’s use of passé compose, moving between simple past, past perfect, and present tense to describe the habitual aspect of repeated action in the past (the walks) and their ongoing impact in the present. Faulkner’s famous statement that the past is not dead, it is not even past, applies both to Julius’s submerged memories that resurface over the course of the novel and to the collective memory of the city, with 9/11 only the most recent of many traumas. Julius’s first-person voice in Open City is disconnected and blurry. Despite a few friendships, he is a lonely protagonist. His most intense relationship is with the city, though this, too, is a relationship marked by deep ambivalence. On Julius’s long walks through the city he remarks, I felt that all of the human race was pushing, pushed by a counterintuitive death drive, into movable catacombs. Above ground I was with thousands of others in their solitude, but in the subway, standing close to strangers, jostling them and being jostled by them for space and

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breathing room, all of us reenacting unacknowledged traumas, the solitude intensified. (7)

What is the shared trauma that makes the subways seem like catacombs and casts a shadow over the city? If 9/11 is not named here, there are two important reasons. First, it is important for Cole’s melancholic narrative that this loss is not fully brought to consciousness. He wants 9/11 to be the undertow of the novel—everywhere but only occasionally drawing us down. Second, Cole wants 9/11 not to stand in for all traumas but to serve as a portal to other traumas. For Cole, 9/11 does not have the single integrity of the event; it cannot stand in for the single significant trauma because that would erase both the traumas that came before it and the traumas that followed it, indeed, the traumas that the response to 9/11 occasioned. Cole’s New York is full of the ghosts and echoes of earlier traumas. As a psychiatric resident, Julius sees a client who has written a well-regarded biography of Cornelis van Tienhoven, secretary of New Netherland in the middle of the seventeenth century during the brief Dutch settlement of the island that would come to be known as Manhattan. The title of her fictional book-within-a-book, The Monster of New Amsterdam, points to the scandal of Tienhoven’s twenty-year term as schout of New Amsterdam, in charge of local administration, local prosecution, and law enforcement. Tienhoven was deposed for the excessive brutality of his rule, found responsible for the massacres of Indian tribes along the Hudson as well as the failure of diplomacy that led to bloody retaliations targeting the Dutch colonists. Julius’s client achieves great success with her book, which is nominated for a National Book Circle Critic’s award. But Julius knows that this success has not mitigated the anxiety and depression that accompanied the revelations of her research, and he sees her depression as a sane and ethical response. In a session, the client tells him, “It isn’t right that people are not terrified by this because it is a terrifying thing that happened to a vast population. And it’s not in the past, it is still with us today; at least, it’s still with me” (27). This close echo of Faulkner’s aphorism calls attention to both historical persistence and historical amnesia, with 9/11 as the most recent of “terrifying things” to befall New York. Julius’s meetings with his client lead him to reflect on the historical legacy of colonialism and slavery in America. I wished to believe that things were not as bad as they seemed. This was the part of me that preferred not to be entertained, that preferred not to confront the horror. I wondered, as Coetzee did in Elizabeth Costello, what the use was of going into these recesses of the human heart. But why show torture? Was it not enough to behold, in imprecise details, that bad things happened? (31)

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Julius’s response serves as a meta-textual reflection on the goals and methods of examining trauma. The imagined book-within-a-book, and the portrait of the writer as sufferer, contaminated by the trauma of her narrative, resonates with Cole’s problem and his project. Is there a measure or a method that can avoid the sensuous exploitation that serves as an act of voyeurism rather than an act of witness? Julius’s reflection is symptomatically inarticulate—“that bad things happened” is the language of a child. His is a deliberately apophatic language that looks as it looks away. When Julius first comes across the ruins of the twin towers in his wanderings around the city, he looks away from the “great empty space” (52). A little later he comes across the ruins again and acknowledges, “The empty space that was, I now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center. The place had become a metonym of its disaster: I remembered a tourist who once asked me how he could get to 9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones” (52). This petrification is also a reification of language and ideas. September 11 telegraphs a single and sublimed event. But Cole’s evasiveness is here strategic; he wants to resist “getting to 9/11,” turning the event into a fetish, or worse, a pretext. Instead of seeing the sublime in the site, Cole returns it to the mundane, marking the restaurant on the corner, the lonely men dining behind the large glass windows like a Hopper painting, the gym that overlooks the construction pit and the elevated subway like “a livid vein drawn across the neck of 9/11” (58). A little later on he mentions the neon sign in a diner window by 34th street that reads “Support our Troops” although “the first two letters of TROOPS failed to light” (74). The war as pernicious error is a crucial part of Cole’s understanding of the historical impact of 9/11. Cole wants to use 9/11 not as a metonym for a unique, exclusive, or singular event but as a way to expose earlier traumas. “This was not the first erasure on the site,” (58) Julius remarks, noting and naming the small streets razed to make way for the towers. “All were forgotten now” Julius writes, along with the immigrant communities who worked “the active piers” “pushed across the rivers to Brooklyn” (59). And those communities, in the 1800s, were also not the first displaced: “the site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten. There had been communities here before Columbus ever set sail, before Verrazano anchored his ships in the narrows, or the Black Portuguese slave trader Esteban Gómez sailed up the Hudson” (59). Cole is conscious of the way that ostentatious mourning can serve not only as an act of memory but also as an act of forgetting. If 9/11 becomes the metonym for trauma, then what happens to the memory of earlier traumas, the history of colonialism, slavery, exploitation, and violence that is as old as the New World? In the financial district, near Ground Zero, Julius comes across a small plaque marking an African burial ground almost lost in a patch of grass, “the land had been built over and the people of the city had forgotten

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that it was a burial ground” (220). He is briefly overcome, pained by “the echo across centuries, of slavery in New York” (221). Earlier Julius mistakes canvas sheeting on a scaffold for “the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree” (75). These apparitions are less hysterical than historical, insistent reminders of the forgotten past. In contrast to the novels Gray and Rothberg criticize for their parochialism and domesticity in response to 9/11, Open City reaches back and out, through history and across cultures. Cole is also invested in the injustices that came in the wake of 9/11. Professor Saito’s story of being put in a detention camp during the Second World War is the first of several narratives about immigrants held and punished for the crime of their foreignness. Julius visits a detention center in South Jamaica, Queens, and meets Saidu, a Liberian refugee facing deportation whose lawyer “said I might have had a chance before 9/11” (69). Saidu is part of the collateral damage of the War on Terror—so too is Farouq, the Moroccan clerk in an Internet and phone shop who Julius meets while on a trip to Brussels. But Farouq is something more unsettling than Saidu, not just a passive victim, a potential time bomb. He is furious because his PhD thesis has been rejected and blames the failure on 9/11, The only possibilities are either that they refused to believe my command of English and theory or, and I think this is even more likely, that they were punishing me for world events in which I had played no role. My thesis committee had met on September 20, 2011, and to them, with everything happening in the headlines, here was this Moroccan writing about difference and revelation. (128)

Julius flinches at his fervor, wondering, “how many would-be-radicals, just like him, had been formed on such a slight? It was time for us to leave” (129). Julius wants a middle ground, between the radicalism and cynicism of Farouq and the bombast of patriotism, a mixture of “skepticism, grief, and impatience” that allows for both mourning and for critique. But that middle ground can often feel like a no-man’s land, and if Cole’s book is defined by ambivalence, its melancholic inhibition can also create the impression of stasis. In “Flights of Memory: Teju Cole’s Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism,” Pieter Vermeulen marks Julius’s reticence as pathological, arguing against the idealization of Julius as rootless cosmopolitan and aesthetic flaneur. Vermeulen writes, “Open City interrogates rather than celebrates such a literary cosmopolitanism” (27). He calls Julius a “fuguer” rather than a flaneur, after the nineteenth-century French travelers who walked away from their lives and wandered the countryside in an amnesiac, dissociated states. Through Julius, Vermeulen suggests that Cole critiques the position of the rootless cosmopolitan and the consolations of art, writing “Open City insistently denies its readers the

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illusion that imaginative transports can stand in for real global change. It forcefully reminds its readers that empathy and intercultural understanding alone cannot achieve the changes to which cosmopolitanism is committed, and that they can only point readers to the world outside—to a global landscape riven by injustice and inequality” (42). By contrast, I would argue that Cole (to paraphrase Nabokov) is not a writer of didactic fiction and that his work has no such moral in tow. Julius—who sends Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism to Farouq as a gesture of friendship and hope—does not celebrate cosmopolitanism as much as he inhabits its weak potential. Cosmopolitanism provides Julius’s liminal vantage point between the inside and outside, for what Barthes might call “a subversion that is pensive” (38). In contrast to Vermeulen’s reading of Open City as an insistent, forceful, and didactic call to social change, I think the book is a defense of the non-motivated examination, the wandering walk, the exploratory metaphor; if his book resists anything, it is the pressing of trauma into ideology, even the ideology of Vermeulen’s vague call for global justice. Cole’s cosmopolitanism is deliberately melancholic. “I read Freud only for literary truths” (208), Julius writes, but “his writings on grief and loss, I found, remained useful” (208). Julius writes of melancholia and of 9/11, There had been great heroism, of course, although as the years passed, it had become clear that aspects of this heroism were overstated. There was firmness of purpose, too, in the language of the president, there was certainly political squabbling, and there was a determination to rebuild right away. But the mourning had not been completed, and the result had been the anxiety that cloaked the city. (209)

Freud writes that mourning can respond to the loss of a person or “the loss of an abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (243). What distinguishes melancholia from mourning is that the loss is not fully apprehended and “one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost” (245). The work of melancholia is more mysterious than the work of mourning since “the inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely” (245–46). This inhibited absorption is rather like the fog that envelops Cole’s narrative. Julius’s sense of disconnection, his isolation, his dull passivity, and sense of the city as rushing to meet its own death make sense as part of his melancholic sensibility. In the anthology Loss: The Politics of Mourning, editors David L. Eng and David Kazanjian try to recuperate a political understanding of loss as a mode of subversion and critique, “productive rather than pathological, abundant rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary” (ix). They read the unfinished work of melancholia as an “open and ongoing

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relationship with the past, . . . a continuous engagement with loss and its remains” that “allows us to gain new perspectives on and new understandings of lost objects” (4). Melancholia’s tendency “to express multiple losses at once” (5) gives it—like Cole’s novel—“a certain palimpsestlike quality (5). This melancholic layering is productive for history as for politics since it opens up to earlier histories, unfinished acts of meaning, and ongoing acts of testimony. This is a Benjaminian weak messianism that cannot save the past but can seize the memory of the past “for a world of new representations and alternative meanings” (5). One of the symptoms of the melancholic is critical acuity. Freud writes that the melancholic “has a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic” (246). Though he accuses himself, he is often correct, so much so that Freud wonders “why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind” (246). The melancholic consciousness is not deluded in its perception of reality; instead, the refusal to be deluded, and the insistence on speaking a demystified truth, marks the melancholic as unwell. The melancholic’s un-resting self-critical eye is accompanied by an “insistent communicativeness which finds satisfaction in self exposure” (247). Finally, melancholia is a response not just to repression but to ambivalence, which “belongs by its nature to the repressed” (257). This ambivalence “behaves like an open wound” (253), though if we follow Eng and Kazanjian, there is something important about this openness, painful as it is, since it resists falsifying narratives of healing and closure. Open City ends with a powerful image for ambivalence. Julius takes a tourist boat past the Statue of Liberty, that master-totem of American freedom. This vision occasions the last of the book’s history lessons. Although it had its symbolic value right from the beginning, until 1902 it was a working lighthouse, the biggest in the country. In those days, the flame that shone from the torch guided ships into Manhattan’s harbor; that same light, especially in bad weather, fatally disoriented birds. The birds, many of which were clever enough to dodge the cluster of skyscrapers in the city, somehow lost their bearings when faced with a single monumental flame. (258)

The birds fly into the Statue of Liberty, not in terror but in error, dying for their misjudgment. Cole’s last paragraph is a catalog of the dead: on October 1 of 1888, for instance, “fifty rails had died, as had eleven wrens, two catbirds, and one whip-poor-will” (259). This final catalog stands in for the unnamed dead of the twin towers but also for all of the casualties of freedom, from the Black Atlantic to the border wall, those who lost and lose their lives on their way to the land of liberty.

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WORKS CITED Altenberg, Peter. Telegrams of the Soul. Translated by Peter Wortsman. New York: Archipelago Books, 2005. Print. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Print. Cole, Teju. Interview by Pragya Tiwari, “A Particular Eye, a Particular Sensibility.” Hindu, February 18, 2012. June 2, 2014. Web. ———. Open City. New York: Random House, 2012. Print. Cole, Teju (tejucole). “[Whatever concerns the pain of others is impossible writing made briefly possible. After lightning, night is still night.]” May 11, 2014, 8:19 p.m. Tweet. ———. “[Writing as transit visa through the impossible]” May 12, 2014, 4:21 a.m. Tweet. ———. “Not what you wish to remember, but what insists on being remembered. Looking out on dark water and suddenly seeing a ship slip by.” May 16, 2014, 8:28 a.m. Tweet. ———. “Not ready to enter another intense spell of remembering around Ground Zero. Not ready. But I can feel it moving into view.” May 16, 2014, 8:36 a.m. Tweet. ———. “These days, ‘too soon’ is a punchline. But when I see anything about 9/11, my first reaction is still to look away and think, ‘too soon.’” May 16, 2014, 8:38 a.m. Tweet. ———. “What I tried to do in OC was to literally write ‘about’ it. Circumstantially, circumambulatorily. Still hesitant to get any closer.” May 16, 2014, 8:57 a.m. Tweet. ———. “Wouldn’t want to go there with anyone who doesn’t have my exact blend of skepticism, grief, and impatience. In other words, I must go alone.” May 16, 2014, 9:23 a.m. Tweet. Eng, David, and David Kazanjian, eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14, 1914–1916, translated by James Strachey, 243–58. London: Hogarth, 1986. Print. Gray, Richard. “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis.” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (2009): 128–51. Project Muse. June 2, 2014. Web. Mitchell, W. J. T. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Print. Rothberg, Michael. “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray.” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (2009): 152–58. Project Muse. June 2, 2014. Web. Vermeulen, Pieter. “Flights of Memory: Teju Cole’s Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism.” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 40–57. Project Muse. June 2, 2014. Web. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print.

SIXTEEN Poetic Responses to 9/11 and Adrienne Rich’s The School among the Ruins Lin Knutson

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, thousands of people were moved to write poetry; they did so, I would argue, because of poetry’s ability to convert suffering into imagery and to incorporate a wide range of responses to the event, from the harsh and uncompromising, to the language of faith, to the dripping and self-serving. Thousands of Americans replicated the violence perpetrated by the terrorists within poetic language, expressing the language of violence, revenge, grief, and terror. Others attempted to capture human acts of heroism and nobility in the face of death, as well as express the brutal loss suffered nationally. Poetry, I would argue, is the most ancient, natural, and organic response of individuals in the face of cataclysmic events. After 9/11, thousands of poems were written by individuals, as well as by award-winning poets, expressing their own unique responses to the event. For example, American poet Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) is considered one of the most influential poets of the last sixty years; she documents the oppression of women and of U.S. ethnic minorities. Her poetry has often protested U.S. capitalist practices within desperate third-world countries. Rich’s 9/11 poetry aligns her with the political activists and political poets who blame the United States’ capitalist global practices as the underlying cause for 9/11. After 9/11 there was a massive outpouring of poetry everywhere . . . on telephone poles, public buildings, bus stations, and fire stations; poetry was sent to police, firemen, and public officials. Poems were posted, pasted on windows, tweeted, and, in Curtis Fox’s words, “poetry was 187

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suddenly everywhere in the city.” In fact, there was so much poetry submitted to firemen shortly after the event that a fire chief issued a statement saying, “Thank you for the food and blankets but please—no more poetry” (Allen). That initial massive flow of poetry, however, has become a steady flood so immense it has been categorized into “leftist,” “political,” “spiritual,” and “courage” 9/11 poetry. There currently exist so many 9/11 poems that they can be located on an online catalog through the Library of Congress under: “September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001 Poetry.” Other significant poetic responses to 9/11 include the massive reprinting of famous elegiac poems such as W. B. Yeats’s “Easter, 1916,” about the Easter Rising of Irish nationalists against the British government. This poem repeats the powerful line relating to revolutionary struggle, “A terrible beauty is born” (Yeats). This famous poem highlights the theme that sacrifice and suffering are not forgotten but are outlived by those who honor the fallen. The most commonly printed poem after 9/11, however, was W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” written on the day Adolf Hitler gave a notorious speech that outlines his zeal for conquest in response to a “supposed” Polish provocation. September 1 was the date that Germany invaded Poland at the dawn of World War II. The reason for the resurrection of Auden’s poem is that it is chillingly prophetic to the events of 9/11 in reference to history repeating itself. Capitalistic world dominance and the imagery of skyscrapers are clear in the lines: Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers used Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective man (lines 34–37)

The skyscraper, as representative of nationalistic power, eerily echoes the Twin Towers as symbiotic and symbolic targets piloted by al-Qaeda terrorists on September 1, 2001. The echoing image of the skyscraper became the predominant trope of terrorist activity in the decimation of London, England, or Guernica, Spain, during the blitz, as well as more recently, the statues of Buddha destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. An anthology honoring the event, September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, edited by William Heyen, incorporates not just poetry but memoirs and essays as well, and some have called it “the most important literary document of the event so far” (Goldstein). Many of the writings evoke the emotional devastation of the day itself, such as the poem “The Diver,” which uses the image of the Twin Towers as a backdrop (Allen). Christine Hartzler begins the poem with a description of 1984 Olympic gold medalist swimmer Greg Louganis whose Olympic feat is echoed when “seventeen years later, a man steps out / through the lattice of a skyscraper and / folds himself into a breathtaking pike.” Hartzler glo-

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rifies the 9/11 jumper playing with the image of “breathtaking” to honor physical prowess while displacing our horror at the precipitating terrorist cause for the 9/11 jumper. Hartzler, however, ennobles the 9/11 jumper by paralleling his actions with Olympian victors. Thus his desperate dive toward death is displaced by emotions evoking courage and fearlessness. Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, 1 also focuses on the fall of the towers and the poetry written in the days following. Other poets in this collection include Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn and New York state poet laureate Jean Valentine. The collections begin with an introduction by National Book Award finalist Alicia Ostriker. One of the most original and striking poems in this collection is titled “How to Write a Poem after September 11th,” where poet Nikki Moustaki tells readers how not to respond to events of 9/11: don’t compare the birds to planes. Please. don’t call the windows eyes. We know they saw it coming. We know they didn’t blink (as quoted in Allen)

This poem speaks to the ubiquitous poetry written after 9/11 filled with banal clichés and simplistic responses to the event, but in a clearer dialogic move, she depicts a universal inadequacy to contain the truth of the event in words. One year after the event, U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, who was made poet laureate three months before September 11, 2001, was asked to write a poem for the occasion, and to recite it for the Congress on the anniversary date, September 11, 2002. The resulting poem, “The Names” is written in the elegiac style of Walt Whitman, creating a catalog of names for the lost “names falling into place / As droplets feel through the dark” (lines 6, 7). These names appear where much of the 9/11 poetry was posted: I see you spelled out on storefront windows And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city. I say the syllables as I turn a corner— (lines 21–23).

In this way Collins is able to address both the personal and political simultaneously. The individual losses mirror the collective loss of the nation. The effect of the city and families being forever marked by this event is evident in the lines: One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel. A blue name needled into the skin. Names of citizens, workers, mothers and father, The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son (lines 45–48).

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Collins thus glorifies the common person as hero, as did Whitman. Although elegiac, Collins is aligned with other nonpolitical poets who emphasize the human responses rather than political causes. These writers are not disparaged for their neutrality. Yet others, such as the previously mentioned Adrienne Rich and W. H. Auden use the moment of global violence to reflect on timeless themes of injustice, ignorance, and, most damning, complicity. In fact, Auden’s most-quoted poem “September 1, 1939” argues that both parties share the blame for the terror: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return (lines 19–22).

“Evil” is the metaphor for those who respond to violence with violence. Unlike Collins, Auden points to a shared blame between the two countries at war; Adrienne Rich is another such political poet who, like Auden, examines the “evil” that led to the violence, especially in terms of U.S. exploitive capitalist practices. Why would it be important to single out Adrienne Rich among poets responding to 9/11? She ranks among the best poets of her time, like W. H. Auden and like W. B. Yeats before him. In 1994, Rich won a MacArthur Foundation award for six decades of work as a poet and writer. Earlier in her career, Rich won the National Book Award in 1974 for Diving into the Wreck, a collection of eloquent and powerful poems that helped launch women’s studies programs across the country. In an interesting turn of events, W. H. Auden met Rich in 1951, the year she graduated from Radcliffe College, when he selected her for the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for her first book of poetry, A Change of World. During the arc of Rich’s life, she would explore her inner power and galvanize the lesbian community for more than half a century. D. A. Powell, a San Francisco poet and associate professor of English at the University of San Francisco said in an epitaph about Rich’s death on March 27, 2012, “Every generation has to do a lot of heavy lifting in order to ensure the freedoms and rights of all. Adrienne did about five generations’ worth. I thought she would live forever. Her work had that kind of power.” Rich touched not only poets, but mothers, writers, poets, and intellectuals, as well as the dispossessed and disenfranchised. Rich believed poetry could revolutionize struggles for social justice. In the last several decades of her life, Rich critiqued U.S. capitalist practices, with its accelerating wage gap beginning with “Reaganomics” in the 1980s, and its absolute commitment to private enterprise and corresponding hostility toward welfare spending. Throughout the last several decades, Rich’s poetic power never weakened but rather intensified and became more pointed toward the plight of the disenfranchised within

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U.S. borders. In poetry collections such as Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), and Dark Fields of the Republic (1995), Rich remaps a history of U.S. political atrocities from the early history of the Americas to the contemporary U.S. involvement in the Middle East, creating a tension between history as it has been traditionally recorded and her own particular remapping (Knutson). In the above three mentioned poetry collections, published just six years apart, Rich most lucidly examines the practices—both within and without its borders—that constitute U.S. imperialism. In a previous essay, “Resisting Amnesia,” she argues that the history taught in the United States actually represents a selective memory, grounded in “white man’s nostalgia” (Bread 144). Rich instead advocates “becom[ing] consciously historical” by “describe[ing] his or her journeys as accurately as possible” (Bread 145). By including a history of the dispossessed and colonized in the United States, Rich creates a more “consciously historical” national consciousness (Knutson). It is in her 9/11 collection The School among the Ruins that Rich focuses her attention on elucidating the chaos and national questions in the aftermath of 9/11. 2 The “ruins” of the title is post-9/11 America, and the “school” is the site of new information Rich (and others) learned about U.S. complicity regarding the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In comparison, in the eighth stanza of “September 1, 1939,” Auden writes, “All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie,” making clear his role as poet is to “undo” the “lies” through his poetic voice. In this sense, Rich is the poetic heir of Auden, believing that her voice can and will undo the lies of her government. Rich does exactly that in this collection, which documents the surveillance within the United States and the intentional historical whitewashing of the event for the purpose of removing any sense of “evil” U.S. behavior, thus creating an “alternative” history that obliterates U.S. causes for the terrorist attacks. The poems record the emotional landscape of the first four years following 9/11 with the shock, pain, outrage, and attempts to live in a newly militarized United States with increased hatred, violence, militarism, and surveillance. Rich also creates a personal record of what was not recorded: the personal and physical devastation and the psychological fragmentation and silencing of U.S. citizens. The most obvious example is that of Dr. Ward Churchill, the internationally known scholar of several seminal Native American theoretical texts, who was vilified and disgraced before being fired from his academic post for stating that U.S. capitalist practices in third-world countries were at least partly to blame for the 9/11 attacks. Rich also does not back away from her examination of a U.S. government partially at fault for the terrorist attacks and points to broken systems, policies, and promises. In fact, her later narrative voice in this collection reflects the hesitant, questioning, and unbelieving voice of a traumatized victim of the attacks. Like many other 9/11 poets, Rich uses the ubiquitous image of the skyscraper to reflect the World Trade Center, the site of the attacks, and

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most specifically, the wildly viewed horrific fall of the twin towers. In fact, in her opening poem, “Centaur’s Requiem,” Rich uses the mythological image of a “centaur” as a symbol for the World Trade Center. A centaur is a Greek mythological race of creatures with a human head, arms and torso of a man and body, and legs of a horse. Centaurs are often used in two distinct ways; the first is as a liminal being caught between two worlds or natures, the “civilized” human and the “barbarian” animal. A second common use of the centaur is as a representation of bacchanalia, chaos, unbridled passions, and heavy drinking (reflecting the more animalistic nature of humans). How can the World Trade Center represent the unbridled passion of America? This would be in its unbridled capitalistic attempts to exhibit financial and militaristic control over third-world countries. In Rich’s poem, the death of the centaur both mirrors the death of the myth of the “rags to riches” story of America and instead points to the gluttonous practices of American greed. The poem begins: “Your Hooves drawn together underbelly / shoulders in mud your mane / of wisp and soil deporting all the horse of you” to reflect the fall of the centaur and the fall of the towers from the top floors falling into the mud and street dirt (lines 1–3). It is the animalistic nature of the beast that first falls. Then Rich focuses on the human face and torso of the centaur in the lines: Your longhaired neck eyes jaw yes and ears unforgivably human on such a creature unforgivably what you are deposited on the grit-kicked field of a champion (lines 4–8).

It is the “unforgivably human” characteristics that are the reason for the shame; there was a nobility or integrity to the country that was lacking. It is this aspect of the nation and the creature that Rich finds “unforgivable.” For Rich, our most undeniably human qualities speak to the “evil” behavior that we inflict on other countries, primarily for capitalist gain. That U.S. greed inspired the terrorists is clear in the following line: “what you were marvelous we could not stand” (line 10). Rich touches the mythic or marvelous nature of what America might have stood for (equality and democracy) and posits that which “we could not stand” about America. The United States presents itself as mythic in its ability to embrace the tired and poor, the “humbled masses yearning to breathe free,” as stated on the Statue of Liberty, yet, as Rich has made clear in decades of poetry, the United States hypocritically exploits those very “humbled masses.” Rich is pointing to U.S. propaganda of American mythology as a perfect democracy, when in reality it exploits (enacts “evil”) with its own capitalist agenda. Rich’s technique is to destroy the

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myth and then begin an accurate history that includes the reality of the disenfranchised in the United States. The second poem, titled “Equinox,” refers to the autumnal equinox in September. The equinox occurs twice, in spring and in fall, to document the time or date when the plane of the earth’s equator passes the center of the sun, when day and night are of most equal length. This is also the time when the tilt of the earth’s axis begins moving toward (spring) or away from (fall) the sun, and the days become either shorter or longer. Thus, the events of 9/11 cause an equinotic shift in the United States toward darker days and more devious practices. In the poem, Rich locates the vulnerability and fear of people “thinking we’d scratch out a place,” yet rather than finding camaraderie, Rich stresses the trauma of the connection: “To be so bruised: in the soft organs skeins of consciousness / Over and over have let it be / damage to others crushing of the animate core” (lines 19, 25–27). Thus the “evil” perpetrated has returned to its source. The “damage to others” destroys the very “core” of our being. Rich then moves toward an image of the towers splitting as a human skeleton separating from its own body. She writes: “so bruised: heart spleen long inflamed ribbons of the guts / the spine’s vertical necklace swaying” (lines 29–30). The physical construction of the towers swaying and breaking after the attack is recorded, under Rich’s pen, as the very skeleton of the people of New York and of the nation separating irreparably from the national body. There is no way to escape from the “bruised” and “swaying” effects of this event. Earlier in the poem Rich argues: So can I say it was not I listed as Innocence betrayed you serving (and protesting always) the motives of my government (lines 16–18).

Rich lays the “Innocence / betrayed” of U.S. citizens on the lies and “motives of my government.” The inner pain of recognizing her even deeper betrayal by the government is echoed in her image of the twin towers as a spine splitting from the body and organs where part of the body of the nation is ripped away from the supporting structure. In order for the body of the nation to stand strong, the heart and other functioning organs must work in tandem with the supporting skeleton as a whole. A national structure that betrays and lies to its citizens by stating that compassion is the skeleton, yet proves through its actions that its own financial gain is actually the supporting structure, reflects a national body divided against itself; the body of humanity splits away from a skeleton of national greed that does not support it. By the fifth (and titular) poem in the collection, “The School among the Ruins,” Rich is documenting the “lessons” learned from 9/11. This poem is saturated in irony as reflected in the subtitle of the poem, “Bei-

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rut.Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here.” Thus our initial gaze is directed to U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts that led to the 9/11 event. The poem records the damaged buildings, bombs, and children attempting to make sense of what is happening. Rich’s purpose is to teach the lies the United States perpetuates as truth. Rich gives a snapshot of “before” and “after” the event. The “before” picture is all innocence: “busy with commerce and worship / young teachers walking to school / fresh break and early-open foodstalls” and follows with the decimation of the towers in the second part of the poem (1. lines 15–17): When the offensive rocks the sky when nightglare misconstrues day and night when lived-in rooms from the upper city tumble cratering lower streets cornices of olden ornament human debris when fear vacuums out the streets When the whole town flinches Blood on the undersole thickening to glass (2. lines 1–8).

The fall of the towers, or the “tumble cratering lower street,” and “human debris” evoke the “fear” we experience through the trauma of the innocent. The desire to know the reasons means that “School’s now in session day and night” for her and others attempting to understand the causes for what has happened. We must begin at the very beginning as Rich admonishes us: Today this is your lesson: Write as clearly as you can Your name home street and number Down this page No you can’t go home yet But you aren’t lost This is our school (4. lines 8–14).

Rich refers to the dichotomy between lessons learned about a sterilized U.S. history learned in a classroom in contrast to the education one receives through life experience. Rich uses the metaphor of the classroom to represent a new experience that will teach us the more sinister history of U.S. rampant capitalism. By placing the audience in an elementary classroom, the loss of innocence is manifest. We are “home” as Rich shows us, but after the lessons of our new experience, home looks far less simple and far less innocent. A further lesson given in this poem, is that “I don’t know / why they are trying to hurt us” (4. lines 2–3). This is the crux of Rich’s message as a teacher/poet; when she uncovers “why they are try-

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ing to hurt us,” she will reveal the United States’ lack of compassion for humans and greed. In spite of this disillusioning education, Rich admonishes the reader with her final lesson: “Don’t let your faces turn to stone / Don’t stop asking me why” (6. lines 4–5). Perhaps to prevent her face from turning to stone, Rich participates in the work of unveiling the links between events and underlying causes. For those moments Rich feels it is important to record the truth. Rich explains, in a poem “Tendril,” part of what has been lost post-9/11 is our ability to read “the scrolls” of history, since they are “never to be translated” (7. line 9). Rich argues, in a prose selection called “Incline” as part of the poem “USonian Journals 2000,” that it is “The fake road, its cruel deception, is what we have to abandon” (42). In the poem “Collaborations,” Rich has come to understand the vast unwritten events in U.S. history. She begins the poem with the reflection, “Thought of this “our” nation :: thought of war / ghosts of war fugitive / in labyrinths of amnesia / veterans out-of-date textbooks in a library basement” reflects ways that history, as it has been recorded, is caught in “labyrinths of amnesia,” where the warriors themselves know how “outof-date” and ignored this history is (I. lines 1–4). In speaking of her own attempts to find the truth of 9/11, Rich writes in her final poem of the collection, “Tendril,” that: She had wanted to find meaning in the past but the future drove a vacant tank a rogue bulldozer rearranging the past in a blip coherence smashed into a vestige (8. lines 1–4).

Rich causes us to wonder if the truth she has been searching for, and attempting to record, will ever be known. Another lesson in “Tendril” has to do with the kinds of surveillance that are promoted as protecting U.S. citizens yet quickly become methods of surveillance that violate privacy and private spaces, such as the use of social media or library records that identify specific books read by patrons. Rich uses the image of a “gecko” in the poem, to refer to surveillance as “the gecko, the inching of green / (slips) through the cracks in the fused imperious shell” and remains “unwatched” (2. lines 9, 10). In fact, what appears to be a harmless gecko is actually “monologues of force” that cannot be stopped in a newly militarized world (6. line 9). Individual trauma causes an inability to translate our own reality and to understand meanings behind events. When dealing with trauma, we cannot trust the performance of the event nor our own insight. In one of the bleakest poems, “Ritual Acts,” Rich demonstrates this loss of understanding what we think is real: You need to turn yourself around

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Neither the poet/recorder nor the audience can trust their own insights into a performance that has the potential to be a powerful act of protest. Since we cannot trust the direction we are told to face, we must resist looking in that direction, according to Rich, and force ourselves to “turn yourself around / face in another direction” from where our gaze has been directed by the media. We have to also become skeptical of the reasons given for actions by “others,” such as what “others say she said” or what “others heard” or what “others remember” or what “others say.” We are told by these “others” how to interpret events, and unless we are able to decipher the causes ourselves, then any act of protest, even an act of self-immolation, becomes meaningless “theatre,” an empty gesture. This is the nadir of human experience for Rich, when an act of protest becomes meaningless entertainment, when the protester loses agency and the audience loses the power to respond in a meaningful way. This is indeed living “among the ruins” in a post-9/11 America. The role of poetry in relation to 9/11 continues to carry a central significance to the memorial of the event. On May 15, 2014, President Barack Obama and the 9/11 survivors and relatives marked the opening of the “9/11 museum” at the memorial. News accounts state that the museum recreates the “actual” history of what happened on 9/11 in both chilling and heartbreaking ways, where scenes of horror, including videos of the skyscrapers collapsing, and people falling from them, become the historical record of the event. Museum President Joe Daniels said at the dedication: “You won’t walk out of this museum without a feeling that you understand humanity in a deeper way” (Peltz). I am left with Rich’s lessons of this event, however, which separate the signifier from the signified and dismantles the myth from the history as recorded by a U.S. government determined to cause citizens to view this history in a singular way. At the memorial, plaques stand outside, and poetry continues to be written by visitors. At the newly opened museum, 9/11 families of victims donate personal effects, and a vast number of poems are stored in a protected and revered place. The most controversial site of poetry at the memorial is an inscription by the poet Virgil, standing seven levels below ground in the Memorial

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Hall at the repository containing the approximately 8,000 unidentified human remains. The quoted poetic line is from the ninth book of Virgil’s The Aeneid and reads: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time. Virgil.” This line by Virgil is obviously meant to reassure visitors that the trauma of 9/11 events will not be forgotten. If we turn ourselves in another direction, however, we are able to get new insight into the quotation. In the original context of The Aeneid, two young men, Nisus and Euryalus, Trojan refugees from Troy, have landed in Italy under the leadership of Aeneas. Aeneas has temporarily disappeared, and local warriors take advantage of this moment to besiege the wooden fortress the Trojans have built. Two young Trojan warriors, Nisus and Euryalus, risk their lives by sneaking through the troops to warn Aeneas. However, while they are en route, they give in to the temptation to slaughter and rob their slumbering enemies, and they are captured and killed by the enemy troops. Euryalus is captured holding a shining helmet that he has stolen, and his friend Nisus runs out of the woods asking to be killed in the place of his friend. Both young men die, but Virgil promises that their sacrifices will never be forgotten. Therefore, on the surface the quote imbues positive feelings of remembering individual sacrifice, yet those who know The Aeneid recognize the relationship the two young men have with the attackers on 9/11; they may also recognize the connection the United States itself might have with the attackers. The two young men are invaders on foreign soil, attempting to establish a cultural foothold in a country they have invaded; furthermore, they ambush defenseless enemies, and they slaughter them out of greed. The young men are then martyred for their self-sacrifice. They, therefore, exhibit the behavior of al-Qaeda on 9/11, as well as the behavior of the United States in the Middle East and globally. Thus, in at least one site of the 9/11 memorial, poetry speaks truth as only poetry can. On the level of symbol and metaphor, we see the result of “evil” perpetuated and returned in kind. This is perhaps the one site of the memorial where Adrienne Rich would find “truth” told. WORKS CITED “Adrienne Rich.” digplanet. February 21, 2013. Web. www.digplanet.com/wiki/ Adrienne_Rich . Allen, Rachael. “Undoing the Folded Lie: Poetry after 9/11.” Granta. October 5, 2011. http://granta.com/undoing-the-folded-lie-poetry-after-911/. Auden, W. H. “September 1, 1939.” In Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America. 5th ed., edited by George DeWitt Sanders, John Herbert Nelson, and M. L. Rosenthal. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Collins, Billy. “The Names.” PBS NewsHour. n.d. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/ entertainment-july-dec02-names_9-06/. Goldstein, Laurence. “The Response of American Poets to 9/11: A Provisional Report.” In September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, edited by William Heyen. Silver Springs, MD: Etruscan, 2002.

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Hartzler, Christine. “The Diver.” Michigan Quarterly Review 42, no. 2 (2003): 385. Heyen, William, ed. September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond. Silver Springs, MD: Etruscan, 2002. Johnson, Dennis Loy, and Valerie Merians, eds. Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2002. Knutson, Lin. “Broken Forms: Land, History, and National Consciousness in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry: 1989–1995.” In “Catch if You Can Your Country’s Moment”: Recovery and Regeneration in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich, edited by William S. Waddell. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. Metres, Philip. “Beyond Grief and Grievance: The Poetry of 9/11 and Its Aftermath.” Huffington Post. September 9, 2011. Web. www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/09/911poetry_n_954492.html. Peltz, Jennifer. “Obama, 9/11 Kin, Survivors Due at Museum Ceremony.” Talking Points Memo. May 15, 2014. Web. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/obamasurvivors-due-at-9-11-meseum. Rich, Adrienne. An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991. New York: Norton, 1991. ———. A Change of World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951. ———. Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991–1995. New York: Norton, 1995. ———. Diving into the Wreck. New York: Norton, 1973. ———. “Resisting Amnesia: History and Personal Life” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose. New York: Norton, 1986. ———. The School among the Ruins: Poems, 2000–2004. New York: Norton, 2004. ———. Time’s Power: Poems, 1985–1988. New York: Norton, 1989. Yeats, W. B. “Easter 1916.” In Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America. 5th ed., edited by George DeWitt Sanders, John Herbert Nelson, and M. L. Rosenthal. New York: Macmillan, 1970.

NOTES 1. Edited by Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians. 2. See Philip Metres, “Beyond Grief and Grievance: The Poetry of 9/11 and Its Aftermath.”

IV

International Responses

SEVENTEEN “Some Sense of Bridge Making” Exploring the Relationship between America and Pakistan in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Mira Nair’s Film Adaptation Laura Findlay

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), according to the author, did not get much attention in Britain, where he was residing at the time of the novel’s release (Yaqin 47). He was surprised to find that in America there was “a widespread desire to engage with the issues the book raises” (47), despite the overt political nature of the novel. Preconceived notions of different nations’ political and cultural attitudes are something that is at the heart of the novel itself. The novel attempts to highlight and challenge one’s preconceived ideas about culture, religion, fundamentalism, and identity in general. It tells the story of Changez, the novel’s protagonist, using a dramatic monologue, the resultant effect being that the reader is highly aware of the process of co-creation by having to fill in many of the gaps created by Changez’s narrative. Co-creation is central to the idea of bridge making that Mira Nair intended as the main thrust of her 2012 film adaptation. Nair commented that her aim with the film was to create “some sense of healing . . . a sense of communication that goes beyond the stereotype” (BBC) of American and Pakistani culture. However, it is argued here that Nair’s film is less successful in this regard than the novel. Her attempt to defamiliarize the notion of the Other is complicated by the film’s use of certain conventions of the action movie or thriller genre, as well as its attempts to fill in some of the novel’s blanks. 201

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Nair’s film reinforces certain stereotypes of East and West. This chapter analyzes both Hamid’s and Nair’s different approaches to telling Changez’s story and their respective aim to challenge one’s preconceptions about Eastern attitudes toward America. It does so with an awareness of adaptation theory and the notion that comparing a novel to its cinematic adaptation is somewhat limiting and poses many problems in terms of analysis. Thomas Leitch outlines such problems in his article “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” 1 Essentially, Leitch highlights that film adaptations are often analyzed alongside their literary counterparts, and such a methodology often leads to the conclusion that novels can do certain things that films cannot, with one being a verbal medium and the other visual, and that “novels are better than films” (154). This chapter argues that, due to the similar aim of the writer and director, there is a case for comparing the novel to the film. It is not the purpose of this chapter, in line with the problems of adaptation theory discussed above, to question Nair’s fidelity to Hamid’s novel but instead to assess the film’s success at bridge making and to question the strategies that Nair adopts to do so. In comparing Nair’s approach to Hamid’s, this chapter does not prize one medium over another but hopes to show that, despite being considered reductive in the face of articles such as Leitch’s, Hamid’s novel proves to be more successful in achieving bridge making than Nair’s film does. Such a comparative assessment is arguably justified due to the similar aims of each work’s creator. The novel opens with Changez meeting an unnamed American man in Anarkali Bazaar in Lahore, Pakistan. Changez’s interlocutor never speaks, and therefore, the conversation between the two is completely one-sided. The novel uses a frame narrative; the majority of the novel charts Changez’s life in New York, his time at Princeton, and his job at Underwood Samson, a top consultancy firm, as well as his troubled relationship with a socially elite New Yorker, Erica. The main thrust of the novel’s narrative is peppered throughout with returns to the Bazaar; Changez changes from storyteller to host as he offers his unnamed companion tea and other refreshments or assures him of his safety in the café when he appears to be ill at ease. The novel is in one sense a familiar story, at first glance it would appear to be an immigrant story; however, it becomes more complicated when Changez begins to question his place in America, which is arguably made more relevant by the events of 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Indo-Pakistan conflicts. In light of the terrorist attacks on New York, America becomes heavily patriotic and less accepting of difference. Once Changez’s relationship with Erica breaks down, due to her depression, resultant disappearance, and possible suicide, America no longer holds anything for him, and he returns to Lahore with very different views on American foreign and economic policy. In this sense, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is more of an emigrant novel, or the “post-9/11 ‘return home’

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novel,” as Pei-Chen Liao terms it (124). Once back home, Changez is determined to make clear his views on the United States and its treatment of those outside of its borders. Near the close of the novel, Changez explains that he now works in Lahore as a lecturer and that due to the very public nature of his apparent anti-American political stance—appearing on a international news network to advocate disengagement with the United States and proclaim that “no country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people so far away, as America” (Hamid, Reluctant, 207)—he has been advised by his “comrades that America might react to [his] admittedly intemperate remarks by sending an emissary to intimidate [him] or worse” (207–8). The novel ends with the unnamed American fearing that he is being pursued on the way back to his accommodation. As Changez leads his nervous companion to the gates of his hotel, the American reaches into his jacket where Changez detects “a glint of metal” (209), perhaps from a business card holder, as suggested by the protagonist himself, or a weapon; one never finds out as this is the novel’s closing image. The unresolved ending and the ambivalent tone throughout the novel means that there are gaps in one’s comprehension of events, creating doubt but also allowing the readers to make their own decisions and judgments of character while also being highly aware of doing so. Mira Nair’s film adaptation required some difficult decisions to be made in order to maintain the sense of co-creation prominent within the novel (essential in bridge making) while also casting enough doubt about Changez’s (Riz Ahmed) intentions and possible affiliations with fundamentalism before the film’s denouement. When Nair read Hamid’s novel, she saw it as an ideal opportunity to represent contemporary Pakistan on film. She has commented on the fact that the national identity of her adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is unclear, calling herself “an Indian director making a Pakistani film in America” (Kaplan). Filmmaking across borders mirrors Hamid’s approach to identity in the novel. He believes that the idea of nations is an imaginary concept: “human beings are coming to recognise the illusion that nations are out there as empty spaces” (Yaqin, 48). This is embodied in Changez’s character as he lacks a firm identity: he struggles with whether he is Pakistani, American, a New Yorker, or all of the above. However, the multicultural nature of the film’s production does not prevent it from adhering to certain stereotypes, particularly regarding America and its control of the Pakistani military and its interference in foreign affairs. While there is truth in such aspects of the film, the way in which these incidents and relationships are portrayed does not appear to move past media and other cinematic portrayals of American activities in the East. Characters are defined more concretely in the film in order to add a level of realism. Nair was clear that not all aspects of the novel would translate to the screen, especially some of the novel’s deliberately unresolved issues or

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“blanks.” The film, for the most part, is told from Changez’s viewpoint but was rewritten to have Changez, a lecturer with ties to political groups and activists, being questioned by a journalist who is working for the CIA. Nair lands on a very firm, and somewhat risky, adaptation of the novel. Changez’s life is in danger, and therefore, it is more likely that one’s sympathy will lie with him. Consequently, Nair’s film lacks the unresolved quality that Hamid’s novel has; the novel ends with one having more questions than answers, and one is also encouraged to question his or her own judgments and where such decisions derive from. Arguably these concrete ideas of self and identity do not allow the audience the same level of creative involvement in the story as the novel does. The character portrayals that Nair offers give one set ideas about the film’s protagonists, which are rarely challenged. Such an approach makes it difficult for Nair to avoid pigeonholing characters or promoting certain stereotypes. One is asked to suspend disbelief when reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist due to its style of storytelling. Hamid has commented on his stylistic choice for the novel, calling it “alienating,” serving to create more questions than answers (Yaqin 47). To have the story be told completely from Changez’s point of view creates tensions that Hamid believes “suggest some of the frictions of our time” (47). The effect is such that the reader is left to make his or her own judgments of Changez. Is he is a reliable narrator? Can the American interlocutor be trusted, and what are his motives are for listening to Changez for so long? These are just some of the questions that such an approach generates. Bearing in mind the political climate after 9/11, there are many different interpretations that can be gleaned by using this form. Hamid uses such a structure in the hope that one’s own preconceptions will be brought to light by their interpretation of the characters and, in particular, the unresolved nature of the novel in general. Nair suggests “some of the frictions of our time” by fleshing out characters and offering more defined portrayals. Arguably this serves to help create the more modern feel to the film that the director was aiming for. However, in doing so, Nair creates stereotypes or unsubtle symbols, such as the journalist Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber), whose name denotes all things American and whose occupation quite clearly points to the film’s interest in media spin and how it relates to representations of fundamentalism and Islam. By comparison, Hamid’s characters are lightly sketched, but he does not leave one’s interpretation entirely to chance and offers some hints throughout the novel. The American is described as having shortcropped hair and an “expansive chest—the chest . . . of a man who benchpresses regularly” (Hamid, Reluctant, 1). When describing him further Changez comments that “sportsmen and soldiers of all nationalities tend to look alike” (2). The unnamed interlocutor also seems to be on edge and

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watchful of others in the market, including Changez. He has a satellite phone, a piece of kit that one would expect a federal agent or military officer to carry when abroad, and Changez notices a large bulge in the man’s jacket, which he clutches or fidgets with when nervous, hinting that this may be a gun or weapon of some type. Military language is also used to describe Changez’s time at Underwood Samson, creating a comparison between the military appearance of the American and the military precision with which Changez “focused on the fundamentals” when living and working in the United States. He describes his time at the consultancy firm, commenting “that shorn of hair and dressed in battle fatigues, we would have been virtually indistinguishable” (Hamid, Reluctant, 43). When Changez decides to leave the firm, he feels as though he is betraying his colleagues. Jim, a senior colleague at Underwood Samson and something of a mentor for Changez, tells him, “In wartime soldiers don’t really fight for their flags, Changez. They fight for their friends, their buddies. Their team” (147). It is clear that Changez’s time at Underwood Samson represents a ruthless battle, a war for economic power and dominance, with no thought to the human cost. Hamid, however, does not offer as many hints about Changez as he does about the unnamed American. It is true that one is given an account of the protagonist’s life in America and his return to Lahore but is told little of his appearance and demeanor as he sits in the café cafe with his American companion. His tone appears friendly, calm, and composed, but due to the one-sided nature of the novel, it is, like many other facets of this story, left open to other interpretations. It is interesting to note some of the more sinister readings of Changez’s supposed intentions and attitude toward the American. At a conference Hamid spoke at in London, an American speaker explains that his first reaction to the novel was anger: “When you read, I hear Changez as a much more tentative, selfreflective man, and in the novel I didn’t hear that at all. I heard somebody who knew he was playing with somebody who was off his turf” (Hamid, “Slaying,” 231–32). Hamid replies that he is happy with this type of response as it highlights the level of co-creation between author and reader that he aimed for. The example above highlights the way in which the novel makes one aware of his or her own judgments and interpretations and, therefore, opens up the possibility of questioning them or comparing them to other responses. Riz Ahmed’s portrayal of Changez in Nair’s film is “tentative and selfreflective,” and there appears to be no menacing tone in his conversation with the journalist / CIA informant, Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber). This removes much of the ambiguity surrounding the protagonist’s true nature, and it is easier to ascertain whether or not he should be trusted and sympathized with in comparison to Lincoln, who is hiding his true na-

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ture from Changez and is suspicious and guarded throughout most of their time together. There is a tendency toward conflict, action, and violence in Nair’s film—the most obvious example of this being that the film opens with a kidnapping (that Changez is thought to be involved in), which later ends in murder. The CIA agents are keen to get their man and at one point order Lincoln to “turn in the target” in reference to Changez. The film is clearly told from a Pakistani point of view but in a different sense from Hamid’s novel. Nair’s adaptation does not allow room for one’s own fixed notions of nation and race to be questioned; instead, in highlighting the stereotypes of Eastern and Western culture, religion, and politics, Nair’s film cannot detach itself from the stereotypes that it attempts to deconstruct or question and appears to reinforce them. Changez is very much cast in the role of the Other, a victim of America’s ignorant and discriminatory terror profiling; Lincoln and the agents he works for have preconceived notions of “radical” political thinkers like Changez and use their inside intelligence and surveillance techniques in order to harass an innocent man because of his public denouncement of the United States. Although Lincoln is proved wrong about Changez at the end of the film, and has a lesson to learn about his own prejudices, the audience holds the knowledge that Changez is innocent. As the film offers this level of resolution, the judgment falls on Lincoln and is not reflected back at the audience. The audience is left with the notion that America is ignorant and discriminatory in its handling of possible terrorist suspects, something that was already established at the beginning of the film, as such notions are never challenged or interrogated in Nair’s adaptation. Therefore, Changez firmly remains Other, and unlike Hamid’s text, this is never transposed to his American counterpart. By focusing on action and violence, Nair may be commenting on the brutality that countries such as Pakistan have witnessed as a result of the War on Terror. Concretely proving Changez’s innocence is arguably a way to counteract Islamophobia, and Lincoln as journalist is an obvious symbol of the media’s promotion of such images. However, not allowing the audience to come to its own judgment, by offering a resolved ending, dissolves any lasting notion of one’s own participation in such prejudice; the fault here lies with Lincoln—it is his lesson to learn, not ours. One’s preconceived notions about other cultures and religions, often, and especially in the wake of 9/11, heavily manipulated by the press, are challenged by the character of Changez in the novel due to his lack of religion and, at the beginning of his story when he moves to America, his seeming lack of nationality as well. The title of the novel itself is also something of a ruse as one expects Changez to demonstrate that since moving back to Lahore that he is now a fundamentalist, a term often associated with Islam. However, Hamid plays on the more general definition, meaning someone who strictly adheres to the basic principles of a

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subject or discipline. Mahmood Mamdani’s article “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism” argues that there is a tendency to equate Islam with terrorism. In this way, it is culture, not capitalism or democracy, that separates those who want peace from those who follow terror. Mamdani argues that “culture talk has turned religious experience into a political category” (766). What Hamid offers through his protagonist is “an attempt to look at America. But with still stubbornly Pakistani eyes” (Yaqin, 45). This view then is not fundamentalist but fundamentally Pakistani and of one Pakistani only. Hamid is careful to make this distinction and, as much as the dramatic monologue makes clear that what one is reading is the opinion of one character, Hamid constantly returns to a complex and, at times, paradoxical sense of one’s notion of home and identity when attached to place. In doing so he forces readers to see things from a certain perspective while allowing them enough space to make their own judgments. He is also careful to point out that Changez is not religious. Hamid has described his protagonist as “a secular humanist . . . with a kind of tribal nationalism that attaches itself to Muslims. What that makes him in terms of religion is very much open to debate” (“Slaying,” 236). The author has also admitted that the notion of having a character be a representative of Islam but not spiritually be a Muslim was something that he wanted to play with in the novel (236). With this in mind, it is not unfeasible that the fundamentalist aspect has nothing to do with whether or not Changez may be religious or align himself with a form of radical or political fundamentalism with links to terrorism but instead has more to do with Underwood Samson’s guiding principle to “focus on the fundamentals”: a strict adherence to getting the job done for economic gain, no matter the human cost. Terrorism is more prominent in Nair’s film, and she firmly makes a connection between terrorism and American economic policy. During a scene with Changez and Mustafa Fazil, a Muslim activist and mujahid who attempts to convert Changez to his cause, Fazil tells him, “Our only hope as a people are the fundamental truths given to us in the Qur’an.” Changez admits that he is tempted to fight, to “bleed the enemy,” due to his witnessing firsthand the “arrogant America” described by Fazil, but when the activist mentions “fundamental truths,” Changez sees his colleagues at Underwood Samson. The scene briefly cuts to a room of his old business associates turning to face the camera, smiling, beckoning. A clear comparison is made between the fundamentals of terror and those of American commerce. Subtle connections between Pakistan and America, as nations once colonized by Britain and Europe, are made in the novel. The importance here being the fact that America, a once-colonized nation, now practices a form of neo-colonialism, oppressing other nations financially and militarily. This reference to colonial forms of power in the novel brings closer

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what is considered a modern nation that looks to the future, America, with a form of violent action that is believed to have its roots in a fundamentalist adherence to an ancient religion, Islamic terrorism. In making these connections, therefore, the novel portrays America as a dominant and terrorizing force, challenging one’s notions of what it means to terrorize and who the perpetrators are. Nair’s film makes more active and violent connections using the CIA and a journalist in order to represent American force and media spin. Nair dismisses the Old World connections and the history of colonizing forces in order for the more modern concept of America as a country that has been accused of harassing and discriminating against foreign countries that it has dealings with. Nair’s film takes the dramatic monologue aspect of Hamid’s novel and mixes it with the genre conventions of a thriller. Where Hamid’s novel keeps one guessing, Nair’s film crudely offers stereotypical depictions of CIA maneuvers and practices gleaned from Hollywood action films, making many of the cursory characters seem like facsimiles of one another and unimportant to the main thrust of the story were it not for the fact that they hold Changez’s fate in their hands. Close analysis of some of the café scenes provide evidence of this. Changez meets journalist / CIA informant Bobby Lincoln in a café in Lahore under the pretext that Changez is giving an interview in order to clear his name from accusations that he was recently involved in a kidnapping. However, Lincoln is there with the notion that Changez is already caught up somehow. Fitted with an earpiece, Lincoln is constantly in touch with other CIA members who are armed and ready to take action. The café is darkly lit, and the camera cuts between the café and the nearby location of Lincoln’s fellow CIA agents. Both the thriller genre and the relevant and current issue of surveillance after 9/11 have heavily influenced Nair’s approach to such scenes. The camerawork is fast paced, as are the edits, and non-diegetic, dramatic music is used to elicit a sense of fear and anxiety; there is a sense that at any time Changez’s “comrades” or the CIA agents may become impatient and strike. This gives the effect that Pakistan is a precarious and chaotic place, a far cry from the modern and atypical image of Lahore that Nair wanted to promote. However, on closer inspection, it is clear that much of these techniques are used to show that the Americans are the secretive and untrustworthy ones, leading one to suspect that Changez has been honest throughout his narrative. The result is that the spectator is clearly aligned with Changez throughout the film. Spectators get to know him more intimately in Nair’s version as we see him interact with others, especially Erica, in emotional and sexually charged scenes. Despite the fact that the majority of the film is told from Changez’s point of view, the cinematic style that Nair adopts opens his “monologue” up into a narration that visually incorporates the responses and reactions of others, as well as having

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Lincoln there as a real character with real motives and responses to Changez’s tale. This is not a choice made due to the supposed “constraints” of the cinematic medium. Films such as Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist (1998) and Julia Loktev’s Day Night, Day Night (2006) have focused on point-ofview storytelling, leaving the audience to make its own judgments based on intense and intimate one-sided portrayals. In terms of Changez and Erica’s relationship, Nair avoids the darker aspects of Erica’s character that are drawn out in the novel, such as her mental-health issues and her apparent suicide. Instead one is left with a relationship that fails due to Erica’s inability to move past her ex-boyfriend’s death. In a key scene in the film that marks the end of their relationship, Changez goes to one of Erica’s exhibitions. She is an artist in the film and not a writer, translating her emotional response to death and loss into a more visual medium. At the exhibition, Changez is dismayed to find that his private and personal moments with Erica form the basis of her work. Images of the rubble of the Twin Towers are projected on a wall and are intercut with images of a half-naked Changez, who looks as if he may be yawning or screaming. Changez appears dismayed by all that surrounds him, and the camera offers a point of view shot as he notices a brightly lit sign that reads “Pretend I’m Him.” The text, taken from a scene in the novel that Nair does not use, refers to the moment when Changez sleeps with Erica while she pretends that he is her dead lover. Nair rarely shows Changez in a bad light, and this scene, like many others, portrays him as paranoid and confused due to his experience of post-9/11 America; primarily he is still a victim. He shouts at Erica, “Was that the idea? How chic! How chic! I’m going to date a Pakistani after 9/ 11.” Later, in the same scene, as the pair continue to argue outside of the gallery, Changez tells Erica, “You could do [this] because you are reckless. You are reckless enough to drive drunk with the person you supposedly love sitting in the passenger seat.” Again, this is a marked change from the novel as Erica’s deceased boyfriend, Chris, originally dies of cancer. In Hamid’s version, Erica is a sad and sympathetically written character; in Nair’s, it is difficult to have sympathy for Erica due to her impenetrable nature and the fact that, although not intentionally, she played a part in the death of her boyfriend. Despite Changez’s cruel words to Erica before they part company, the camera follows him, once again focusing the audience’s sympathy toward him. The camera cuts to a medium shot of Changez looking upset, regretful, and confused. It is clear what one’s interpretation of such visual manipulations, during the exhibition and the argument, should be; Hamid’s novel muddies the waters by comparison. In the novel, a pivotal moment between Changez and Erica is when they first attempt to have sex. Erica is clearly uncomfortable with this level of intimacy, and in order to get through to her, Changez suggests that she pretend that he is Chris. This scene is key to understanding the

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difference in the tone and approach of Nair’s and Hamid’s portrayal of the love relationship, and it merits being quoted in full: I do not know how to describe my experience of what happened next; I cannot, of course, claim that I was possessed, but at the same time I did not seem to be myself. It was as though we were under a spell, transported to a world where I was Chris and she was with Chris. . . . Her body denied mine no longer; I watched her shut her eyes, and her shut eyes watched him. I can still recall her muscularity, made more pronounced by her gauntness, and the near-inanimate smoothness and coolness of her flesh as she leaned back and exposed my touch to her breasts. The entrance between her legs was wet and dilated, but was at the same time oddly rigid; it reminded me—unwillingly—of a wound, giving our sex a violent undertone despite the gentleness with which I attempted to move. (Reluctant, 120)

Again, this is entirely from Changez’s perspective, but in a marked change of tone from Nair’s depiction of their relationship, it is difficult to have sympathy for Changez here. He is a character who negates his own identity in order to satiate his own desire for Erica. Also, the language used in this scene, such as “gauntness,” “coolness of her flesh,” “rigid,” “a wound,” “violent undertone,” depicts Erica as a corpse and the act of intercourse between them akin to rape. The imagery and language used by Hamid elicits an uncomfortable response in the reader, and it has no parallel in the film adaptation. Hamid takes risks with Changez’s character while managing to not entirely alienate the reader yet still maintain one’s interest and have one empathize, understand, or question him despite such behavior. Avirup Ghosh argues that “their initial difficulty in having sex metaphorically suggests Changez’s inability to ‘penetrate’ a culture that is not his and an inscrutable past that Erica is trapped into. . . . Changez searched for ‘Am-erica’ in Erica” (Ghosh 52). One must be wary of placing too much emphasis on Erica’s character, like Underwood Samson, as another metaphor for America; just as Changez’s views as a Pakistani do not represent those of Pakistan as a nation, one must consider that Erica, as an individual character, cannot represent a nation either. It is, however, an interesting analogy. Erica’s breakdown and apparent suicide, as well as the uncomfortable sex scene above, is something that is entirely avoided by Nair’s film, and so a correlation between Changez’s failed relationship with an American woman and the termination of his career and, therefore, his visa, resulting in his return to Lahore, is thin on the ground. Erica comes to see Changez in order to say good bye and end the relationship before he leaves for home. This is another aspect of the film that gives closure to an unresolved aspect of the book. However, the result is that Changez does not appear to be haunted by Erica, or America, in the film in the same way as he is in the novel. If one is to believe that his experience in

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America has shaped his political and activist views in Lahore, almost leading him to join the mujahideen, then an essential part of that is his relationship with Erica and her powerful and haunting hold over him. This is another example of the ways in which the film adaptation loses much of the resonance and power of the novel due to offering the audience resolution and explanation at every turn. The closing scenes of the novel and the film differ greatly, and a comparison of the two solidifies the notion that Hamid’s novel is more successful in bridge making between America and Pakistan, between self and other. Nair’s film ends with Changez helping Lincoln by giving him a location that he believes the mujahideen use. Lincoln does not manage to call it in due to a bad connection but receives a message with a picture of the kidnapped professor, now dead. He suspects Changez of foul play and leads him at gunpoint out into the now rioting crowds of students in the street. In the ensuing melee, one of Changez’s students, Sameer, is shot and killed by Lincoln. The Pakistani police work together with the CIA to try to control the crowd through violent force. Once Lincoln is rescued by his cohorts, he realizes Changez’s innocence, seeing that he did not instruct the kidnappers to execute the American but was merely texting his sister. This very definite and closed end to the film leaves little room for the audience to consider how they may have responded in a similar situation, nor is one encouraged to question his or her own notions on nation, race, religion, and terror. The film ends with Changez giving a speech at Sameer’s funeral where he urges others not to take revenge for his student’s death. The film offers sentiment and morals, leading one not to judge for himself or herself but to be guided how to think. Hamid’s novel offers no guidance and leaves much of the responsibility and, more importantly, the awareness of judgment with the reader. Nair’s failure to resist finality, closure, and guidance in her film results in a work that appears to reinforce stereotypes and maintain the distance between East and West, self and other, us and them. In this regard, the bridge making that she hoped for in adapting Hamid’s novel is lost. WORKS CITED Ghosh, Avirup. “‘I Was Not Certain Where I belonged’: Integration and Alienation in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” Rupkatha Journal: On Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 5, no. 1 (2013): 48–54. Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Penguin, 2007. ———. “Slaying Dragons: Mohsin Hamid Discusses The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” Psychoanalysis and History 11 (2009): 225–37. Kaplan, Fred. “Crossing Dangerous Borders.” New York Times, April 19, 2013. Leitch, Thomas. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45, no. 2 (2003): 149–71.

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Liao, Pei-Chen. Post-9/11 South Asian Diasporic Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Mamdani, Mahmood. “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism.” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 766–75. Nair, Mira, dir. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Doha Film Institute, 2012. “The Reluctant Fundamentalist Opens Venice Film Festival” BBC, August 30, 2012. http:/ /www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19421160. Yaqin, Amina. “Mohsin Hamid in Conversation” Wasafiri 23, no. 2 (2008): 44–49.

NOTE 1. There are a number of critical works and collected essays that contain introductory chapters highlighting the tendencies outlined by Leitch concerning adaptation. See Christine Geraghty’s Now a Major Motion Picture (2008), Brian McFarlane’s “It Wasn’t Like That in the Book” (2000), and James Naremore’s Film Adaptation (2000).

EIGHTEEN Haunting Cartographies Mapping the Aftermath in Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st Danica van de Velde

In the opening sequence of Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier’s second feature-length film Oslo, August 31st (2011), the viewer is drawn into a constellation of personal memories relating to the Norwegian capital from anonymous voices. These memories move from those that are specific to the city’s topography—“I remember taking the first dip in the Oslo fjord on the first of May. . . . I remember driving into Oslo on Sunday at sunset. The city was completely empty”—to those that take on a more personal and reflective tone, “I remember dad sitting in the kitchen, smoking. Drinking coffee, listening to the radio.” Accompanying the voice-over memories, all which begin with the phrase “I remember,” is a fragmented montage of moving imagery appropriated from old Norwegian films, archival footage from government bodies, and amateur home movies, juxtaposing panoramic shots of the city with impressionistic views of empty streetscapes and private and domestic scenes. These mnemonic snapshots map the embodied spaces of the city, presenting a warmly nostalgic vision of Oslo that works to create a collective, and yet intimate, recollection that Trier describes as a “collage of memories from the city” (“Interview Joachim Trier”). Serving to visually articulate the significance of the act of witnessing, the opening sequence draws attention to the manner in which memory recalls and archives the changing palimpsest that comprises the space of the city. 213

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However, as the sequence continues, the quaint recollections slowly give way to melancholic realizations of change: “There’s only offices there now. . . . It’s a parking lot today. . . . I never saw him again.” Here, the persistent repetition of the words “I remember” as a precursor to every audio vignette instills the film with an anxiety concerning the geographical location of memory so that the echoing of the statement follows the repetitious structure of trauma. This anxiety reaches its climax with the prologue’s final moments, which features four differently angled shots of the controlled demolition of Oslo’s fifteen-story Philips Building on April 30, 2000. These images, which move from a hauntingly enigmatic black-and-white shot to a view from within the collapsing wreckage of the demolished building, serve to disrupt the embeddedness of spatial memory that is fleetingly established by the voice-overs. More evocatively, the concertinaing of the building with its rising smoke and debris acts as an uncannily disturbing visual companion to the falling of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001 (henceforth referred to as 9/11). As the viewer falls in tandem with the camera’s point of view within the Philips Building, the relationship between memory and urban space is left in a state of suspension, whereby the desire to remember is undercut by the presence of destruction. Set across a twenty-four-hour period at the end of the Norwegian summer, and concluding on the title date, Trier’s film follows Anders, a recovering narcotics addict on day release from his rehabilitation clinic. He has been given leave to attend a job interview with a literary magazine before returning to complete the final two weeks of his program; however, the promise of a fresh start is illusory, as Anders grapples with the decision whether or not to end his life. Throughout the course of the day, the viewer witnesses Anders’s excruciating job interview, in which he admits to his drug addiction when a period of inactivity on his resume is brought to light, as well as his encounters with old friends and acquaintances in Oslo and his desperate phone calls to an ex-girlfriend who now lives in New York. Although Oslo, August 31st makes no specific mention of 9/11, the impact of this global event maintains a subtle presence that is woven into the narrative and visual textures of the film and thus deserves critical attention. By setting the film in Oslo, the comprehension of the urban condition of post-9/11 trauma becomes local and individual. Oslo, August 31st focuses on the everyday impact of 9/11, thereby replacing the insecurity concerning the sanctity of space being violated by terrorist attacks with a more intimate anxiety relating to Anders’s relapse into drug use. Indeed, the power of the film resides in the fact that neither the events of 9/11 nor the subsequent War on Terror are explicitly stated. Rather, this internalization of the post-9/11 condition casts a shadow over the narrative, finding expression in small gestures and thereby emphasizing its status as an unspeakable transnational trauma. The remnants of 9/11 are echoed in

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the destroyed memory of the Philips Building, the faint sound of fire engines heard in the background of scenes, the architecture in Oslo’s city center covered in scaffolding, the characters’ obsession with the PlayStation combat-based game Battlefield, and, finally, the specific use of a calendar date in the film’s title. Collectively, these elements both allude to and reenact the violence escalating from the fall of the Twin Towers. Although Oslo, August 31st premiered a number of months before the 2011 Norway attacks, the film has been allegorically linked to the violent acts staged by lone terrorist Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo and Utøya (Macaulay, “City Limits”). While these attacks have been employed as a historical referent for the film, there has been a distinct lack of critical discussion on the manner in which Oslo, August 31st situates itself as a post-9/11 portrayal of the modern city. Bearing this in mind, Cara Cilano highlights the importance of reconsidering 9/11 through a transnational lens, arguing, “This movement beyond the US traces how different peoples and cultures may represent and understand their post-9/11 worlds in non-US centered ways, thereby pointing toward possible reconfigurations of what this event means and how it may alter relations between groups and nations” (17). Oslo, August 31st provides a different route into Cilano’s movement beyond the United States and takes the conceits of urban space, memory, and trauma as its central interest. The disembodied recollections attached to the architecture of Oslo in the film’s opening moments emphasize the haunting capacity of the spectral sites of the city, while the shot of the Philips Building being demolished architecturally foregrounds the tenuousness of spatial recollection and witnessing, an important trope in cultural theory surrounding 9/11 (Howie 4–10). The events of 9/11 uncannily haunt Trier’s film, setting in motion a local narrative that considers how the impact of the terrorist attacks in New York have spread beyond the boundaries of the United States. This post-9/11 cartography is beset by the ghosts of the past, cinematically framing the city as a space of anxiety divided between “then” and “now.” In an alternative imagining of the memory collage from the opening, midway through the film the viewer hears Anders’s memories of his parents and their connection to the city of Oslo. As his voice-over unfolds, building an image of his family background, the camera maps the spaces that Anders passes in Oslo. This double movement through the city and recollection reinforces the idea that pervades the opening moments of the film that memories are held within architectural structures and physical spaces. Indeed, the memories in the opening sequence of Oslo, August 31st highlight the way that memory is geographically implicated and how the understanding of self is formed through and by people’s interactions with places. Significantly, the voice-overs were not scripted but were documentary-style interviews in which Trier asked his subjects to speak about “their experience of coming to Oslo, growing up in Oslo, living in Oslo” (“ND/NF Q&A w/ Joachim Trier”). Notably, the

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interviewees’ responses to Trier’s request were not limited to their observations of the city but were intertwined with their relationships, emotions, and desires. Andreas Huyssen perceptively writes that, “Built urban space—replete with monuments and museums, palaces, public spaces, and government buildings—represented the material traces of the historical past in the present” (1). Here, Huyssen draws attention to the manner in which architecture houses official history—a concept that is extended in Oslo, August 31st by suggesting that public spaces are equally involved in private memory making. During one of the publicity interviews that coincided with the European release of the film, Trier discussed the manner in which Oslo, August 31st is split into two simultaneous narratives—one that focuses on Anders’s story of failing to assimilate into life outside his rehabilitation clinic and the other on Oslo: “I wanted there to be the theme of . . . memory and identity in the city, how we remember a city differently, how we share the same spaces but we don’t see the spaces in the same way” (“Interview Joachim Trier”). The delicate relationship between memory and place has deservedly been given an abundance of critical attention whereby scholars have sought to examine the place of memory and emotion in tactile space. In his theorization of the concept of “urban memory,” Mark Crinson, writes that: Urban memory can be an anthropomorphism (the city having a memory) but more commonly it indicates the city as a physical landscape and collection of objects and practices that enable recollections of the past and that embody the past through traces of the city’s sequential building and rebuilding. (xii)

Significantly, the intertwined relationship between memory, identity, and place was called into question after 9/11 when the architectural signifier of the World Trade Center—which arguably represented not only the visual skyline identity of New York but also served as a tangible monument to “placing” the spatial identity of New Yorkers—was destroyed in fire and ashes. E. Ann Kaplan notes that, “for those nearby, they [the Twin Towers] functioned phenomenologically as part of people’s spatial universe, in and of themselves, not especially representing American capitalism or American might” (15–16). When filmmakers were tasked with creating a visual vocabulary to respond to and cinematically capture the event, the results often fell into one of two categories. For example, John Markert delineates the genres and styles of film within the Hollywood system that conventionally deal with the post-9/11 climate into the following: war films, which range from deeply patriotic studies that feature representations of the “evil foreigner” to narratives demonstrating a critical or antagonist view toward patriotism, and films that center on the “events surrounding the World Trade Center” (viii–x). According to Markert, the overriding cultural stance in both genres of

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film position Americans as “victims” with non-Americans portrayed as “savages” (x). Providing a departure from cinema with a specific American political agenda, Oslo, August 31st engages with an alternative discursive mode of post-9/11 filmmaking that removes the “us versus them” conflict in hegemonic Hollywood 9/11 narratives. Instead, Trier gives priority to a reading of the city and memory that renders an engagement with this pluralistic ideology entirely irrelevant. Through focusing on Anders’s individual narrative, among the chorus of memories that open the film, Trier is ultimately concerned with exploring the state of the post-9/11 city in transition. The appropriation of the residues of 9/11, as opposed to a reconstruction of the events, in Oslo, August 31st attends to the problematics of aesthetically representing the attacks. As Kristiaan Versluys argues, “September 11—for all the physicality of planes impacting on giant skyscrapers and for all the suffering caused to victims and their near and dear—is ultimately a semiotic event, involving the total breakdown of all meaning-making systems” (2). As a global event, 9/11 reached hypervisual status through the constant media repetition of the planes collision with the Twin Towers and the buildings’ violent disintegration to the point that Jean Baudrillard went so far as to refer to 9/11 as an “imageevent” (27). Transnational audiences were forced to witness the terrorist attacks and experience a form of vicarious trauma even though New York may have been remote to their own everyday experience (Kaplan 2). It is no exaggeration to state that the impact of 9/11 has spread globally, altering the emotional landscape of the urban city and spatial mobility (Howie 40). The immediate underlying impression was that major cities no longer felt safe or that they belonged to their inhabitants, as they were subjected to increased surveillance in the face of future destruction to the urban fabric. Indeed, to interrogate the intersection of memory, identity, and place in the post-9/11 period is to equally engage with an attempt to archive urban space in response to the physical alteration of the city. The significance of memorializing urban space is most poignantly portrayed in a scene that follows Anders’s failed job interview. As he sits alone in Åpent Bakeri, he observes the café’s patrons and listens to their conversations. However, the film momentarily takes an unusual trajectory whereby the camera shifts away from Anders to track the movements of people walking past the café. As they are never introduced into the narrative, they can barely be described as peripheral characters and therefore function more as guides to an intimate view of Oslo. Providing the camera with an omniscient perspective, it first follows a man as he walks to a park and forlornly sits on a bench before a lake. Later the camera tracks a woman as she goes to the gym, buys her groceries, and then goes home. At first blush, these small views into the journeys of people on the streets of Oslo can be interpreted as Anders’s imaginings of the private lives of the people who pass the window of the café. While the

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sequence highlights the banal, everyday occurrences from which Anders is excluded as a recovering drug addict, this strange movement through the city can also be viewed as a conscious form of urban mapping on Trier’s behalf. Specifically, in his discussion of the Oslo setting of the film he commented: I thought there was something interesting about this rather melancholic journey through a city that’s sort of expanding and changing as much as it is at the moment. Norway, and particularly Oslo, is in a place where . . . architecturally, sociologically a lot of new things are happening and I thought it would be interesting just to try to make a film to capture that moment in time. (“Interview: Joachim Trier”)

Moving beyond Trier’s premise of presenting a “collage of memories of the city” in the opening sequence of the film, Oslo, August 31st is also actively engaged in a process of capturing, or mapping, Oslo during a specific period. The act of mapping, which Denis Cosgrove defines as “visualizing, conceptualizing, recording, representing and creating spaces graphically” (1), can arguably be located within a visual medium such as film. The specific temporality of maps, which means they are often documents that are created in the past for present use, aligns their construction with acts of memory making such that maps are analogous to archival documents. Given the film’s thematic intersections with 9/11, the idea of mnemonically mapping the city cannot be understated, as 9/11 was a traumatic event that significantly altered people’s personal landscapes (Kaplan 15). By cinematically mapping Oslo, Trier attends to the anxieties of change that were born out by the 9/11 attacks and that emanated beyond the geographical borders of the United States. While the memorialization of Ground Zero demonstrates an active attempt to remember and commemorate the sequence of events that occurred on 9/11, there has been little response to the ripple effect that has spread globally and changed city dwellers’ relationship to space. Trier’s mapping thus responds to the post-9/11 urban paranoia and fear that the architectural textures of the city could be transformed and rendered unrecognizable at any moment. In the opening memory sequence, one of the recollections recounts the following detail: “I remember hours on trams, busses, the metro, walking along endless roads to some mythical party, where you never knew whether you were invited or not.” Through cinematographer Jakob Ihre’s utilization of long takes and tracking shots, Oslo, August 31st visualizes this experience for the viewer, rendering him or her as a witness to the city, as the film maps streets, parks, cafés, bars, nightclubs, and private residences. By focusing on the everyday sites of Oslo, Trier creates a cinematic version of Situationist Guy Debord’s psycho-geographical guides that reflect “subjective, street-level desires and perceptions rather than a synoptic totality of the city’s fabric” (Corner 231). At the heart of

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Debord’s mapping is the concept of dérive, or drift, in which “the contingent, the ephemeral, the vague, fugitive eventfulness of spatial experience becomes foregrounded in place of the dominant, ocular gaze” (Corner 231–32). Notably, the aim of the Situationists was “to return the map to everyday life and to the unexplored, repressed topographies of the city” (Corner 232). This process of mapping in Oslo, August 31st is most beautifully realized on what will be Anders’s last night alive. In the early hours of the morning, Anders rides through the city on the back of a girl’s bicycle as his friend sprays them with foam from a fire extinguisher. Their evening concludes at a well-known echo spot and a public pool on the final day before it will be emptied of its water when the season shifts to autumn. Significantly, Anders is never presented as an active participant in any of the events in the film, such as when he does not join his friends in the swimming pool and the action is intercut with scenes of Anders leaving the pool before he physically departs the scene. Throughout the film he is constructed as an outsider who follows the drift of Trier’s film and therefore embodies the problem of homelessness that was a result of the sociocultural upheavals of 9/11 (Liao 5). While life continues around him, Anders symbolizes stasis and takes on the role of a melancholic flaneur. Anders’s experience as a flaneur is melancholic due to the fact that he is unable to transcend his homelessness within the space of the city. When he is first introduced in the film, he watches a woman, named Malin with whom he has spent the night, sleep in a hotel bed. As he pulls back the curtains, the view from the window is of a busy motorway. The scene then cuts to Anders walking along this route before entering deserted woodlands where he fills his jacket pockets with stones and wades into a river carrying a large rock. He becomes submerged in the lake but abandons his attempt to commit suicide and walks back to his rehabilitation clinic in wet clothes. During a subsequent group session in the clinic, he admits to feeling numb and comments, “The past days I haven’t had any . . . I haven’t had any strong feelings in any direction.” What Trier captures through Anders’s movements through Oslo is an anaesthetized geography that reconstructs the mood of homelessness of 9/11, as the city is caught in the transition of rebuilding, as represented through the layers of scaffolding covering buildings, and imbued with an underlying unease resonating from Anders’s unstable place within society. Throughout the film, it becomes clear that Anders desires to forget, to be lulled into an endless amnesia. To this end, in the final moments of the film, Anders takes a fatal overdose of heroin in his parents’ home. As he lies motionless on the bed with the needle protruding from his arm, the camera switches to a reverse panning shot of his parents’ house. It then cuts to a view of the abandoned public swimming pool where he spent the morning, the balcony at a party he attended the previous night, a tram meandering through a city street, the exterior of Åpent Bakeri, the

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park bench where he sat talking with his friend Thomas, his single room in the rehabilitation clinic, the lake where he attempted to commit suicide, and the hotel window view that opened the start of his journey. These images, which enigmatically close the film, take on the status of private ruins, as their visual repetition within the film’s diegesis establishes the symbolic significance of space and the manner in which specific sites haunt Anders’s personal trajectory. These spaces are not merely haunts in the sense that they are frequented but are the ghostly spaces of Anders’s personal trauma, which is realized in a statement he makes to Thomas: “Look at me. I’m 34 years old. I have nothing. I can’t start from scratch. . . . It’ll get better. It’ll all work out. Except it won’t.” Anders’s personal trauma of drug abuse and feeling incapable of beginning a new chapter in his life serves as a counterpoint to a statement that Jacques Derrida made following 9/11: “The wound remains open by our terror before the future and not only the past” (Borradori 96). In Trier’s film, the paralytic homelessness experienced in the face of future terrorist attacks is displaced onto Anders’s personal fear of the future after leaving the rehabilitation clinic, as the anxiety experienced in the past bleeds into the expectations for the future. To return to the conception of urban space developed through Situationist thought, Ivan Chtcheglov (writing under the pseudonym Gilles Ivain) claims that: “All cities are geological; you can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past” (168). Here, Chtcheglov emphasizes the inherent palimpsest-like nature of cities in which the effacement and modification of space does not completely erase its ghosts, setting in motion the repetitious experience of trauma. In the context of post-9/11 New York, the empty space left in the wake of the collapse of the World Trade Center represented what trauma theory would define as a wound through which the voices of this traumatic event emanated (Caruth 2–7). The redevelopment of the site into a memorial and museum has tied it further to its traumatic historical traces even though the exposed wound of the disaster has been covered. However, the trauma arising from 9/11 was split, as it not only dwelled within the recesses of the physical space of Ground Zero but also on people’s personal interfaces—televisions, computers, etc.—owing to the persistent media saturation of the attacks. This brutally repetitive media broadcast of the planes flying into the Twin Towers and the collapse of the buildings ablaze enacted the Freudian structure of trauma, transmitting views of the attacks on an endless loop to global audiences. The impact of this, in the words of Howie, is that, “9/ 11 was an atemporal event that can be understood in time and space in apparently unlimited coordinates of temporality and spatiality” (60). Oslo, August 31st attends to the spread of disaster and the manner in which it impacts on a personal level as a “half-buried trauma” (Versluys

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15) experienced as urban paranoia and terror. Indeed, through reversing the angle of the footage of the collapse of the Philips Building, so that the viewer visually experiences it from within the imploding building rather than as a distanced witness, as was the case with the media footage of 9/ 11, Trier emphasizes that the trauma conveyed in his film is an internal one that is mapped onto the city. Trauma, as a crisis in temporal perception, involves the impingement of the past into the present. However, it is not reimagined through the lens of nostalgia that imbues the memories that open Oslo, August 31st but through a sense of foreboding. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery F. Gordon employs the terminology of haunting to detail “those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, . . . when the over-and-done-with comes alive. . . . Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future” (xvi). Although Gordon makes a distinction between trauma and haunting, in Oslo, August 31st these psychological tropes are inextricably intertwined. Anders’s trauma stems from an inability to reconcile past, present, and future, and he is therefore haunted by past errors that impose deep fear on future possibilities and which reside within the architectural interstices of the city. While Anders is condemned to face and repeat the actions of his past, he is equally troubled by the notion that he will be forgotten, a neurosis that begins when he asks Thomas’s daughter if she remembers him and receives no response. His confession in a conversation with Thomas that no one needs him is compounded in a statement that Anders makes to a girl he meets on his last night alive: “No, no, you’ll have a thousand nights like this one. You won’t remember this. Everything will be forgotten.” However, by highlighting the date in the film’s title, and symbolically aligning it with the major world event of 9/11, Trier places emphasis on remembrance rather than forgetting. In this sense, the use of the date as a title is extremely significant as it functions as “a bearer of history, a monument to a moment” (Wood, “Northern Lights”). By shifting the focus onto personal trauma and transforming it into “a bearer of history,” Trier draws attention to the private histories that run alongside official historiographic accounts of 9/11 and simultaneously addresses the issues inherent in reimagining historical trauma. Previously I highlighted that the power of Oslo, August 31st resides in what it does not show, so the fact that 9/11 is only alluded to, rather than fully represented, is key. Cathy Caruth writes in a different context that “the question of history in . . . film . . . is a matter not only of what we see and know but also of what . . . is ethical to tell” (26). Unlike films that deal with traumatic historical events, such as the Holocaust or the First and Second World Wars, there is already an abundance of moving imagery that functions as evidence of 9/11’s existence. Divorced from the depressing after image that has haunted the global consciousness, Trier instead creates a

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narrative that responds to how the event has shaped people’s relationships to city space and the significance of retaining a sense of urban memory. In the final moments of the film when Anders returns to his family home, he gazes at a table with an assortment of photos sprawled across its surface. These family photos again highlight the overarching thematic preoccupation with the fragility of memory and the ephemerality of time that pervades Oslo, August 31st. Through mapping a city disconnected from the attacks of 9/11, and yet implicated in their impact by virtue of the event’s global nature, Trier sheds light on the manner in which the city is bound up with personal memories and how its alteration can affect everyday understandings of the self. The aftermath of 9/11 revealed the tenuous existence of cities in a new age of terrorism and how an individual’s place within that landscape could not be taken for granted. By shifting this transnational trauma to Oslo, Trier reframes the post-9/11 period at the subterranean level of everyday life and draws attention to the significant links between personal memory and urban space. Notwithstanding the melancholic ending of the film, there is still a sliver of hope that a small part of Oslo has been preserved as a cinematic artifact. WORKS CITED Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2002. Print. Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Print. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Print. Cilano, Cara. “Introduction: From Solidarity to Schisms.” In From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and after in Fiction and Film from Outside the US, edited by Cara Cilano, 13–24. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Print. Corner, James. “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention.” In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove, 213–52. London: Reaktion, 1999. Print. Cosgrove, Denis. “Introduction: Mapping Meaning.” In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove, 1–23. London: Reaktion, 1999. Print. Crinson Mark, ed. Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2005. Print. Howie, Luke. Terror on the Screen: Witnesses and the Re-animation of 9/11 as Image-Event, Popular Culture, and Pornography. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2011. Print. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Print. Ivain, Gilles. “Formulary for a New Urbanism.” In Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology, edited by Joan Ockman, 168–71. New York: Rizzoli. Print. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Print. Liao, Pei-Chen. “Post”-9/11 South Asian Diasporic Fiction: Uncanny Terror. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. Macaulay, Scott. “City Limits.” Filmmaker Magazine. Web. April 2, 2014. http:// filmmakermagazine.com/37482-city-limits-2/#.U2R6WMelWmF.

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Markert, John. Post-9/11 Cinema: Through a Lens Darkly. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2011. Print. Oslo, August 31st. Directed by Joachim Trier. Performed by Anders Danielsen Lie. Strand Releasing, 2010. DVD. Trier, Joachim. “Interview: Joachim Trier.” Interview by Mekado Murphy. New York Times. Web. March 20, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/video/movies/ 100000001566931/interview-joachim-trier.html. ———. “Interview Joachim Trier.” Interview by UniversCiné. YouTube. Web. March 20, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arENabjORW0. ———. “ND/NF Q&A w/ Joachim Trier, Oslo, August 31st.” Interview with Film Society Lincoln Center. YouTube. Web. April 5, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=SWI22UymfeY. Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Print. Wood, Gaby. “Northern Lights.” New York Times. Web. April 2, 2014. http://www. nytimes.com/2012/05/17/t-magazine/oslo-northern-lights.html?_r=3&ref=travelissue&.

Index

9/11, 62, 106; and American justice, 115, 124, 126, 138; and cinema, 53–63, 105–117n4, 201–212n1, 213–223; and foreign policy, 30, 40n4, 159; and imagery, 53–55, 57–59, 60–62, 139, 143, 187–188, 191–192, 194, 221; and plane crash, 31, 139 24 (Surnow and Cochran), xvi, 119–128 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick), 22 Abdullah, Shaila, xi, xiv Abu Ghraib, 35, 110, 114, 121 adaptation theory, 202 Adorno, Theodor, 14n1 Akhtar, Ayad, xiv Al-Qaeda, 10, 105, 106, 122, 125, 196 allegory, 8, 10–12, 13, 29, 33, 36, 41–52n2, 61, 68, 136, 140, 215 Altman, Rick, 56 ambiguity. See narrative ambiguity ambivalence, 10, 82, 147, 177, 180, 185, 203 American Dream, the, 46, 48, 50, 102 American exceptionalism, xiv, 41, 46, 49, 69, 74, 94, 95–96, 98–101, 106, 140, 161, 191–192. See Pease, Donald amnesia, 18, 25, 181, 183, 195, 219 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 188, 190, 191 Avengers, The (Whedon), 53–54, 58, 60, 62 Barthes, Roland, 177–178, 184 Bayoumi, Moustafa, 121 Beigbeder, Frédéric, xi Benjamin, Walter, 61–62, 185 bin Laden, Osama, 105–117n4 Bissonnette, Matt, 105, 111–112 Bloomberg, Michael, 20 Boal, Mark, 107 Boston Marathon bombing, the, 53, 59

Boxall, Peter, xii, xv, 97, 103 Braschi, Giannina, xi, xvi, 155–164 Breaking Bad (Gilligan), xvi, 131–142 bromance, xvi, 144–145, 147–148, 151 Burke, Kenneth, 155–156, 158, 161, 163–164 Bush, President George W., 11–12, 15n5, 19, 33, 41, 83, 105, 110, 138, 141, 145, 175n3; and administration, x, xiv, xv, 31, 32–35, 37, 39, 40n4, 82, 89, 93, 98–99, 105, 114, 116, 138 Butler, Judith, 132, 148 capitalism, 95–99, 102–103, 140, 157, 158–159, 159–160, 161–163, 190, 194, 207 carnivalesque, 145 cartography. See space Caruth, Cathy, xi, 7, 220–221 catharsis, 62, 106, 113, 210–211; and problematizing, 45, 115, 185 Cheney, Dick, 33, 35, 84, 119 chronos, 19 cinema vérité, 107 cityscape. See superhero film cycle and Oslo, August 31st civil liberties, 98, 126–127 classified information, 106 closure. See catharsis Cole, Teju, xvi, 177–186 Collins, Billy, 189–190 colonialism, 4, 159, 181–182, 207–208 combat veteran, xii–xiv, 36, 39, 79–91 consensus, mythic, 80–81, 88–89 constitutionality, 50; and questioning, 9, 30, 35, 50, 121, 126 consumer culture, 49, 61 cosmopolitanism, 183–184 cyclical time, 57–58, 59, 62; and linear time, 57–58, 59 225

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Index

Dark Knight, The (Nolan), 55 Dark Knight Rises, The (Nolan), 53, 59–60, 62 Day Night, Day Night (Loktev), 209 DeAngelis, Michael, 147–148 Debord, Guy, 61, 218–219 DeLillo, Don, xi, 25, 41, 67, 94, 178 Department of Homeland Security, ix, 34, 44, 94 Derrida, Jacques, 220 disenfranchised, the, 190, 193 documentary veneer, 107 drone strikes, 106, 122, 125–126 Egan, Jennifer, 18 emasculation, 133–134, 134–136, 137, 139, 141 empathy, 20, 29, 38, 83, 184 “end of irony,” the, 4–5 enhanced interrogation. See torture ethical turn, 97, 177 ethnicization of Islam, 72–73 eulogy, 53–63 Falling Man, the, 58, 62, 178, 188–189 Faulkner, William, 180–181 feminism, 75, 93, 132, 137, 143 fetish, x, 45, 103, 182 flaneur, 178, 183, 219 Foer, Jonathan Safran, xi, 25, 100 Fountain, Ben, xii, xv, 79–91 Foucault, Michel, 20 Franzen, Jonathan, xvi, 94, 96, 104n2, 165–175n3 Freud, Sigmund, 184–185, 220 frontier values and spirit, 146–147, 150–151 fundamentalism, xii, 32, 33, 38, 201, 203–204, 206–207 gender performativity, 132, 134–135, 137–138, 141, 143–153n6, 165–175n3 genre theory, 55–57, 61 Giuliani, Rudolph, 5, 20 Goodman, Allegra, xi, xv, 93–104n3 Gray, Richard, x, 4, 7, 12, 68, 94, 99, 178–179, 180, 183 Ground Zero, 4, 22, 68, 82, 85, 163, 177, 180, 182, 218, 220

Guantanamo Bay, 108, 114–115, 121 Halliburton, xiii, 13, 175n3 Hamid, Mohsin, xiv, xvi, 68, 201–212n1 hegemonic masculinity, 132, 134, 136, 140–141 Herman, Judith, xi, 7 Hoffman, Cara, xi, xii, xiii, 89 Holzer, Jenny, 18, 23, 24, 27n5 homeland, 50, 79, 83, 85–90 Homeland (Gordon and Gansa), xvi, 119–128 homelessness, 219–220 homosexuality, 145, 151 homophobia, 145 Hurricane Katrina, 48 Hurt Locker, The (Bigelow), 106 Huyssen, Andreas, 216 illegal immigrant workers, 76; and World Trade Center, 47–48, 75–76 I’m So Excited (Almodóvar), xvi, 143–153n6 internal threat, 124, 126 Invisible War, The (Dick), xiii Iraq War, the, 39, 80, 82–88, 96 Islamophobia, xiv, 8, 69–73, 76–77, 78n4, 120, 121, 124–126, 206 Jen, Gish, xi jingoism, xiv, 83 Johnson, Kirk W., xiv Joyce, James, 21–22 journalism after 9/11, xv, 35, 36–37, 69, 73–74, 114, 121, 137, 159 Kafka, Franz, 18, 24 Kaplan, Amy, 85, 89 Kaplan, E. Ann, 216–217 kairos, 19 King, Stephen, xv, 29–40n4 Klay, Phil, xii, 89 Lefebvre, Henri, 55, 57, 59 Leitch, Thomas, 202 Lethem, Jonathan, xv, 17–27n5 LBGTQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Trans, Queer), 73, 147

Index limits of current political discourse, 69, 71, 75–77 Lowenstein, Adam, 61 Luckhurst, Roger, 7. See trauma narratives Malaysian Airlines MH17, ix male gaze, 148 Man of Steel (Snyder), 53, 58, 60, 62 Manning, Chelsea, 122 mapping, 191, 218–219, 222 masculinity, post-9/11, 131–142, 143–153n6 masculinity, traditional, 137–138, 145 maternal, 166–167, 172 Meer, Nasar, 71–73 melancholic 177–186, 214, 219 Melville, Herman, 87 memorializing: memorializing 9/11, 17–27n5, 103 Messud, Claire, ix, 25, 94 mimetic style, post-9/11, 4, 7, 41 Mitchell, W. J. T., 178 mixed genre, 156, 163 mourning, 10, 182–184 Moustaki, Nikki, 189 Muslim communities, 69–71, 72, 127 Muslim identity, xv, 71–73, 124–127, 206–207 myth-making, 44, 47 Nair, Mira. See Hamid, Mohsin narrative: absence of official narrative, 106; competing narratives, 42, 45, 46, 48, 94, 103, 123, 179, 180, 189, 216–217; fragmented narratives, 8; hero narrative, 111, 115, 140; narrative ambiguity, 204–205, 209–211; narratives of innocence, 80–81, 85–86, 87, 90, 100, 125, 192–193, 211; second person narrative, 158–159; slippage, 115; trauma narratives, 7–8, 214 national exceptionalism. See Pease, Donald national fantasy, 50, 95, 98, 100 neoliberalism, 156–157 New York Times Sunday Book Review, ix

227

Noonan, Peggy, 137 Norway attack, 2011, 215 Obama, Barack, xv–xvi, 94, 105, 109, 114, 196; and administration, x, xiv, 39n2 ornamental culture, 131–132 Oslo, August 31st (Trier) xvi, 213–223 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 76–77 Other, the, 4, 67, 140, 201, 206 palimpsest, 24, 182, 185, 213, 220 paranoia, 30, 42, 119–120, 124, 127, 218, 221 PATRIOT Act, 6, 12, 50, 100–101, 106, 126 Pease, Donald, x, 46, 86, 95, 101; and national exceptionalism, xvii, 45, 47, 49, 74, 79, 86 poetry, 187–198n2 polyphony, 68, 77 post-9/11 disaster films, 143–153n6 post-9/11 literary canon, first wave, x, 94, 99; and prescriptive tendencies, x, 3, 14n2, 14n3 post-9/11 literary canon, second wave, x, xii, xiv, 94 post-9/11 parenting, 165–175n3 post-closet, 143–153n6 post-post-9/11, 54–55, 57–62, 113, 115 Postcolonialism, 157 post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), xiii, 88 Powers, Kevin, xii, xv, 80, 83–91 Proust, Marcel, 22, 180 public art, 21, 23 Pynchon, Thomas, 18 race: and double victimhood, 48, 73; and racism, 43, 48, 71–73, 78n4, 127, 140; and stereotypes, 43, 67–78n5, 127, 202, 206, 211 Ratcliffe, Krista, 158, 161, 162–163 rhetorical listening, 158, 162, 164 Ricks, Thomas E., xiii Rich, Adrienne, xvi, 187–198n2 ritual, 17, 19, 22, 24, 80–87, 88, 90, 95 rom-com, 143–153n6; brom-com, 143–153n6

228

Index

Romney, Mitt, 46 Rothberg, Michael, x, 4, 7, 179, 183 satire, xv, 3–4, 13, 20, 23, 82, 145, 150–151 Schwartz, Lynen Sharon, xi, xviin2 Schulman, Helen, xi, xviin2 Seal Team Six, 106, 110–112 self-representation, 69–70 semantic loops, 71, 74–75 sentimental education, 94, 99, 102, 178–179 Snowden, Edward, 104n3 social signifiers, 70, 73, 78n2 space: cartographical space, 213–223; ghostly space, 220–221; homecoming space, 84, 93, 102, 104; liminal space, 49, 90, 95, 184; public spaces, 74, 216; urban space, 54–55, 57, 62, 214, 215, 217, 220, 222; urban space and wreckage, 54, 57–61, 62, 214–215 spectacle, 23, 53, 57–59, 60–61, 110, 112, 147, 153n6, 178; pure, 58, 60 Spiegelman, Art, xi, 178 state fantasy, 46–47, 50, 99 Staten Island, 47–48, 51 Statue of Liberty, 185, 192 stereotype, 70, 71, 127, 202, 204, 211 Stevens, Wallace, 18, 21 superhero film cycle, the, 53–63 surveillance, xvii, 6, 10, 93–94, 97, 99–100, 102–103, 106, 119, 122, 138, 165, 191, 195, 206, 208, 217 temporality, 59, 218, 220; and atemporality, 87, 220 theology, 97, 102, 160 This is the End (Rogan and Goldberg), xvi, 143–153n6 time: queer time, 147–149, 151, 153n6; straight time, 147, 148 torture, xiv, 10, 35–36, 105–107, 113–117n4, 121–122, 138; censure of, 109, 122–123; validating torture, 107–109, 121 terrorism, 31, 34, 45, 48, 58, 60, 68, 115, 119–123, 126, 178, 207–208, 222 Terrorist, The (Sivan), 209

tolerance, 68, 74–75 tragedy: and co-opting, 18, 30, 103 transnational trauma, 214–215, 222 trauma theory, xi, 7–8, 15n4, 220 tribalism, 97, 207 Twin Towers, the. See World Trade Center United 93 (Greengrass), 116n2 unrepresentable, 178 Updike, John, 25, 67 urban memory, 216, 222 Versluys, Kristiaan, xi, 3, 4, 41, 217, 220 Vietnam War, the, 83, 85, 99 Virgil, 196 Vonnegut, Jr., Kurt, xiii, 100 Waldman, Amy, xi, xv, 52n2, 67–78n5 Wallace, David Foster, 18, 22, 26n4 Walter, Jess, xv, 3–15n5, 25, 94 War on Terror, xiv, 10, 31, 36, 67, 96, 99, 104, 106–107, 114, 122, 138, 178, 183, 202, 206, 214 Wayne, John, 137–138 Western, the, 138, 140 white privilege, 140 Whitehead, Colson, xv, 41–52n2 Whitman, Walt, 24, 189, 190 Wikileaks, 122 wish fulfillment, 30, 35 World Trade Center, 18, 22, 24, 31, 47–48, 51, 55, 59, 75, 85, 100, 114, 133, 159–160, 171, 182, 185, 188, 192, 209, 214, 215, 216–217, 218, 220; One World Trade Center, 62 World Trade Center Memorial and Tower, 18, 21, 23, 44, 62, 177, 196 Yeats, William Butler, 188, 190 xenophobia, 39, 49, 68, 121, 124 Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow), xvi, 105–117n4 zombies, 41–52n2

About the Contributors

Damon Barta is a doctoral candidate at the University of British Columbia. He researches representations of American innocence in late-twentieth-century and contemporary U.S. fiction and film, focusing on ways that these representations resist and support a perennially militaristic foreign policy. Anne Canavan currently teaches at Emporia State University in Kansas. In addition to zombies, her research interests include narrative theory, Gothic literature, Southern literature, and American modernist fiction, with an emphasis on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Megan Cannella received her BA and MA in English literature from Bradley University. She currently teaches English at Joliet Junior College and is the urban studies area chair for the MPCA/ACA. Megan’s research focuses on ecocriticism, geocriticism, and urban studies. Ken Feil is senior scholar-in-residence in Emerson College’s Visual and Media Arts Department. Author of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (2014) and Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination (2005), Ken recently contributed to Queer Love in Film and Television (2013) and Reading the Bromance (2014). Dr. Laura Findlay recently completed her PhD, “The Anxiety of Expression: Word, Image, and Sound in 9/11 Fiction.” Her research interests include the relation between word and image in comics, literature, zines, and film. She teaches film studies at Dundee University. Ariela Freedman is an associate professor at the Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Death, Men, and Modernism (2003) and numerous articles on modernism, contemporary literature, and comics and graphic novels. James N. Gilmore is a PhD student in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. His publications include the coedited volume, with Matthias Stork, Superhero Synergies: Comic Book Characters Go Digital (2014). 229

230

About the Contributors

Amir Khadem is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at University of Alberta, Canada. He has an MA degree in English from University of Tehran, where he worked on the theme of terrorism in Don DeLillo’s novels. He is currently working on the social theory of cultural trauma and its various cases in contemporary American and Middle Eastern literature. Shana Kraynak is a lecturer at the University of Southern California whose research interests include masculinity and popular culture studies, with particular regard to post-9/11 representations of masculinity in film, graphic novels, and television. Lin Knutson, PhD, is an associate professor at Mississippi Valley State University. She has previously published on poet Adrienne Rich, as well as Michelle Cliff, and poet H. D. Her research and teaching interests include Caribbean, U.S. ethnic, and women writers. Elizabeth Lowry received her PhD in rhetoric and composition from Arizona State University where she now holds a lecturer position in rhetoric and composition. Her work has been published in the Rhetoric Review, Aries, Word and Text, and in edited collections. Paul Petrovic received his PhD from Northern Illinois University and currently teaches at the University of Tulsa. His work has been published in Critique, Studies in American Naturalism, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and in the collection Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical Essays on the Graphic Novels. Deborah Pless has her bachelor’s in philosophy from Hamilton College and her master’s in screenwriting from New York Film Academy. She runs a website devoted to examining popular culture more critically, blogging at www.kissmywonderwoman.com. Jeffrey Severs is assistant professor of English at the University of British Columbia and specializes in postwar American fiction. He coedited Pynchon’s “Against the Day”: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (2011). Danica van de Velde is an early career researcher at the University of Western Australia, where she completed her doctoral thesis on the cinema of Wong Kar-wai. Her work has recently been published in Write in Tune: Contemporary Music in Fiction (2014). Lloyd Isaac Vayo is an instructor of arts and letters at Concordia University–Saint Paul and lecturer in cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. He has written extensively on 9/11, in-

About the Contributors

231

cluding the coedited anthology (with Todd A. Comer) Terror and the Cinematic Sublime: Essays on Violence and the Unpresentable in Post-9/11 Films. Tamara Watkins holds a BA in English and an MA in communication and multimedia from Saginaw Valley State University and is currently a doctoral student in media, art, and text at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is interested in the connections between fact, fiction, and theory. Marjorie Worthington is associate professor at Eastern Illinois University specializing in contemporary American literature, publishing in journals such as Critique, Studies in the Novel, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Her current book project focuses on contemporary American autofiction.