Time and Affect After 9/11: Lavie Tidhar's Osama: A Novel

Summary

In 2002, Barbara H. Rosenwein wrote ‘Worrying About Emotions in History’, which called for historians to include emotions in their historiography. She traces the history of such an idea from Lucien Febvre in 1941, who saw emotional history as an important means of recognizing the emotional dimension of political situations, an important task if fascism was to be faced and understood. Emotional historiography and its aim to recognize the political impact of emotion had a significant resonance in the aftermath of the Twin Tower Attacks in New York on 11 September 2001 and the military and political response, described as the ‘War on Terror’. While Rosenwein suggests a move towards an emotional historiography, Lavie Tidhar's Osama: A Novel (2011) foregrounds the emotional charge and the subjectivity of the alternate history. In their introduction to this volume, C. Palmer-Patel and Glyn Morgan explain that alternate history and counterfactuals have traditionally been met with a wary reception from historians; for those accustomed to rigorous historiographical practices, the genre deviates too far from established causes, leading to unscientific extrapolations. However, Tidhar finds the emotional subjectivity of the form perfect for dealing with terrorism and the ‘War on Terror’.

Through the use of alternate history's modes, Osama excellently captures the confusion and fear that terrorism inspires and uses as its weaponry. It does so by showing a parallel reality, precariously inhabited by a character named Joe who finds himself in this reality as the result of a trauma that took place in our own world, his involvement in an unspecified terrorist attack. Joe's trauma interrupts the passage of time, damning him to live in an endless present, a traumatic experience of time that Sigmund Freud described as Nachträglichkeit, or ‘afterwardsness’; this concept refers to the deferred nature of trauma, as an event can happen which only reveals its traumatic nature at a later date, forcing the subject to experience the trauma as an atemporal anomaly, something that disrupts his or her experience of linear time.

In the language of the novel, the division between the past and the present imposed by the trauma is represented as a veil between Joe’s present consciousness and the ‘secret inscriptions on the mind’ (151) so that Joe's story is told through these secret inscriptions, the emotions and affects which are all that is left of his life before the trauma.