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Compromised Critique: A Meta-critical Analysis of American Studies after 9/11

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2011

LUCY BOND
LUCY BOND
Affiliation:
Lucy Bond works as a tutor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Email: [email protected]. She is in the final stages of completing her doctoral thesis on the American memorial culture of 9/11.
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Abstract

This paper contends that 9/11 remains subject to a crisis in criticism, resulting from the failure of certain strains within American studies to sufficiently separate their modes of critique from the ideological means of 9/11's manipulation. An overreliance upon themes of trauma, and a failure to observe the means by which these discourses have been compromised by their mobilization in political rhetoric, has led to the development of an interpretative void unable to produce a much-needed counternarrative. Whilst the explicit politicization of 11 September has been widely criticized, far less remarked upon is the extent to which the tropes in which 9/11 is represented have been standardized across popular, political, critical and artistic narratives. Failure to challenge the basic terms of this movement has engendered a compromised interpretative field, in which frames of reference slip too easily between the public and the personal, simultaneously militarizing mourning and sentimentalizing politics. This compromises counterhegemonic narratives, neutering the force of their thrust by presenting them as echoing, and even reinforcing, the discourses of the public–political realm. I will contend that this crisis of representation has arisen, at least in part, from the ubiquity of traumatic narratives, which have been transferred across discursive realms, disguising crucial authorial and critical differences, and seeming to validate the perspective of the state by testifying to an apparent unity of interpretation and response.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 4: 10 Years After 9/11 , November 2011 , pp. 733 - 756
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 James Berger, “There's No Backhand to This”, in Judith Greenberg, ed., Trauma at Home (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 54.

2 Firyal Alshalabi and Sam Drexler, The Sky Changed Forever (Boulder: Aunt Strawberry Books, 2003).

3 N. R. Kleinfield, “A Creeping Horror”, New York Times, 12 Sept. 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/nyregion/12SCEN.html, accessed 1 Jul. 2010.

4 Dori Laub, “September 11, 2001– An Event without a Voice”, in Greenberg, 205.

5 Geoffrey Hartman, “On That Day,” in Greenberg, 5.

6 Donna Bassin, “A Not So Temporary Occupation inside Ground Zero,” in Greenberg, 198.

7 Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 133.

8 However, Žižek's much-cited commentary about the way in which Hollywood disaster epics seem to have pre-scripted the attacks suggests that the possibility of this event (or one similar) had been lying latent in the American imaginary for some time prior to 9/11. See Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002).

9 See, for example, Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Shocken Books, 1982).

10 Critiquing the post-Holocaust, postmodern privileging of the concept of rupture as an essentially despecifying and dehistoricizing impulse embraced by continental philosophers including Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida, John McCumber asserts, “Once it is reduced to this single basic category of rupture, the Holocaust loses its uniqueness; its incomprehensibility merges into that of rupture as such.” That is, the texture of an event, its unique historicity, is lost as the particularity of a given historical moment is subsumed by the incomprehensibility of generalized rupture as the primary postmodern category of experience – a claim that can be applied as much to 9/11 as to the Holocaust. See John McCumber, “The Holocaust as Master Rupture: Foucault, Fackenheim, and ‘Postmodernity’,” in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Postmodernism and the Holocaust (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), 259.

11 Joyce Maynard, The Usual Rules (New York, St. Martin's Press, 2003), 95.

12 Susan W. Coates, Daniel S. Schechter, and Elsa First, “Brief Interventions with Traumatized Children and Families after September 11,” in Susan. W. Coates, Jane L. Rosenthal, and Daniel S. Schechter, eds., September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds (London: The Analytic Press, 2003), 25.

13 Don DeLillo, “In the ruins of the future,” The Guardian, 22 Dec. 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo, accessed 2 Feb. 2011). First published in Harper's Magazine (Dec. 2001), 33–40.

14 Jonathan Franzen, “The Talk of the Town”, New Yorker, 24 Sept. 2001, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/09/24/010924ta_talk_wtc, accessed 2 Feb. 2011.

15 Jay McInerney, “Brightness Falls”, The Guardian, 15 Sept. 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/15/september11.usa1, accessed 2 Feb. 2011.

16 Laub, “September 11, 2001”, 205.

17 N. R. Kleinfield, “Sept. 11, 2001”, New York Times, 7 Sept. 2007, http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/sept_11_2001/index.html, accessed 2 Feb. 2011.

18 Don DeLillo, Falling Man (Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 2007), 246.

19 Ibid., 3.

20 Shirley Abbott, The Future of Love (New York: Algonquin Books, 2008), 136.

21 DeLillo, Falling Man, 5.

22 Abbott, 137.

23 Ibid., 141.

24 Helen Schulman, A Day at the Beach (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 49.

25 Patrick McGrath, “Ground Zero,” in idem, Ghost Town (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005) 175–243.

26 Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream (London: Atlantic Books, 2008), 2.

27 Ibid., 5–6.

28 For examples see Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002); Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002); Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

29 This dichotomy is perhaps best exemplified by the now notorious debate that took place between correspondents in the London Review of Books during late 2001.

30 See Susan Sontag, “The Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, 24 Sept. 2001; Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); Faludi; David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (London: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

31 Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5.

32 This terminology is taken from the title of Cathy Caruth's seminal text. See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

33 For a more thorough history of trauma and the associated discipline of trauma studies see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).

34 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4, original emphasis.

35 Ibid., 153.

36 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 18.

37 See Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Leys; Richard Crownshaw, “The Limits of Transference: Theories of Memory and Photography in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz,” in Astrid Erll and Anne Rigney, eds., Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 67–90.

38 Kansteiner, Wulf, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor,” Rethinking History, 8, 2 (2004), 204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Ibid., 194.

40 Luckhurst, Roger, “Traumaculture,” New Formations, 50, 3 (2003), 28Google Scholar.

41 For the origins of this term see LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust.

42 Radstone, Susannah, “Reconceiving Binaries: The Limits of Memory,” in History Workshop Journal, 59, 1 (2005), 140CrossRefGoogle Scholar, original emphasis.

43 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 2.

44 Ibid., 3.

45 Ibid.

46 Marnie Brow and Roxanne Cohen Silver, “Coping with a Collective Trauma: Psychological Reactions to 9/11 across the United States,” in Matthew J. Morgan, ed., The Impact of 9/11 on Psychology and Education: The Day that Changed Everything? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 37.

47 Ronnie Janoff-Bulman and Ramila Usoof-Thowfeek, “Shifting Moralities: Post-9/11 Responses to Shattered National Assumptions,” in Morgan, 81.

48 Linda J. Skitka, Benjamin Saunders, G. Scott Morgan, and Daniel Wisneski, “Dark Clouds and Silver Linings: Social Responses to 9/11,” in Morgan, 63.

49 Radstone, 137.

50 See Janoff-Bulman and Usoof-Thowfeek; Alice LoCicero, Allen J. Brown, and Samuel J. Sinclair, “Fear across America in a Post-9/11 World,” in Morgan, 97–114.

51 Ibid., 105.

52 Ibid., 100. Drawing upon surveys carried out in New York at various intervals following the attacks, for example, DiGrande, Fox, and Neria assert that, whilst 7.5% of New Yorkers exhibited symptoms of PTSD one month after the attacks, by four months this figure had fallen to 1.7%, and six months on less than 1%. Laura DiGrande, Rachel Fox, and Yuval Neria, “Posttraumatic Stress after the 9/11 Attacks: An Examination of National, Local, and Special Population Studies,” in Morgan, 54.

53 LoCicero, Brown, and Sinclair, 100.

54 Clyde Haberman, “A Trauma that Rippled Outward,” New York Times, 10 Sept. 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/nyregion/11nyc.html, accessed 10 Jun. 2010.

55 E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 2.

56 Ibid., 1.

57 Ibid., 9.

58 Dan Lynch, “Overcoming All Odds,” in Pat Precin, ed., Healing 9/11: Creative Programming by Occupational Therapists (New York: Haworth Press, 2006), 58.

59 Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community”, in Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 185.

60 Ibid., 186.

61 The spectre of which can still be seen in the vehement opposition to the proposed Islamic cultural centre blocks from Ground Zero.

62 Including many of the post-9/11 novels considered below, which are remarkable for the recurrent (and somewhat formulaic) thematicization of the successful “healing” of characters' trauma following the attacks. For examples of such texts see DeLillo, Falling Man; Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (London: Penguin Books, 2006); Maynard, The Usual Rules; D. Dina Friedman, Playing Dad's Song (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); Francine Prose, Bullyville (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).

63 James Trimarco and Molly Hurley Depret, “Wounded Nation, Broken Time,” in Dana Heller, ed., The Selling of 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 30, original emphasis.

64 Lynch, 59. Somewhat ironically, Lynch also contends that this intense interest in patients' recovery may have “significantly hindered” the treatment process. He expands: “In the context of abundant and continued media coverage and the pervasive nature of the events of 9/11 in daily life, facilitating the ability of survivors to develop health and alternative coping responses provided a significant challenge.” Ibid., 59–60.

65 Precin.

66 Nowhere has the conjoining of personal and public narratives been clearer than in the redevelopment of Ground Zero. As the “wounded” centre of New York, Ground Zero marks both the focus of private and familial grief and the place chosen to effect the healing of the nation. Alongside Gettysburg the site has joined the ranks of America's “sacred” places – a designation that permits and facilitates its inclusion in a nationalist political sphere. This mythologized elevation of the site is manifested most clearly in the centrepiece of Daniel Libeskind's contested masterplan for redevelopment. Standing symbolically at the height of 1,776 feet (evoking the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence), the controversial Freedom Tower (now renamed World Trade Center 1) aims to effect the site's resurrection as a symbol of liberty and American exceptionalism.

67 Berlant, The Queen of Washington, 11.

68 Radstone, Reconceiving Binaries, 137.

69 Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, 19.

70 Sidney Blumenthal, “Squandering the Trauma of September 11,” The Guardian, March 11 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/mar/11/september11.uselections2004, accessed 10 Mar. 2010.

71 Richard A. Clarke, “The Trauma of 9/11 is No Excuse”, Washington Post, May 31 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/29/AR2009052901560.html, accessed 16 Feb. 2010.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid.

74 American Psychological Association (2001) Coping with Terrorism, available online at www.apa.org/helpcenter/terrorism.aspx, accessed 13th Dec 2009.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid.

78 Edkins, 9.

79 Coates, Rosenthal, and Schechter, Trauma and Human Bonds, vii. Similarly, for the occupational therapists writing about their work in the aftermath attacks in Precin's Healing 9/11, self-witnessing threatens to eclipse the wider subject of enquiry, particularly in the papers by Christina Hughes (77–94) and Mary Beth Early (95–106).

80 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).

81 Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 2.

82 Ibid., 4.

83 See Greenberg, Trauma at Home; Laub, “September 11, 2001”; Marianne Hirsch, “I took Pictures: September 11 2001 and Beyond,” 69–86; Sumeir Hammad, “first writing since,” 139–46; Bassin, “A Not So Temporary Occupation.”

84 Berger, “There's No Backhand to This,” 53.

85 Judith Greenberg, “Wounded New York,” in Trauma at Home, 21.

86 Seltzer, Mark, “Wound Culture,” October, 80, 1 (1997), 10Google Scholar, original emphasis.

87 Ibid.

88 Ibid.

89 Although texts such as Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Penguin Books, 2007) and David Bernans's North of 9/11 (Montreal: Cumulus Press, 2006) offer a more contextualized geopolitical perspective, arguably achieved by setting their narratives outside the heavily emotional climate of the United States, and New York City in particular. Surprisingly, however, it is the genre of teenage fiction that has done most to dispel the introspective miasma of sentimentality that seems to dominate many of the novels relating to 9/11, offering accounts of how the attacks have affected the lives of Muslims both inside and outside the USA alongside more conventional reflections on their impact on white America. This welcome willingness to address the “Other” can be seen in a number of texts predominantly aimed at the teenage market, including Shaila Abudallah, Saffron Dreams (Ann Arbor: Modern History Press, 2009); Catherine Stine, Refugees (New York: Delacorte Press, 2005); Alshalabi and Drexler, The Sky Changed Forever; Neesha Meminger, Shine, Coconut Moon (New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2009).

90 See DeLillo, Falling Man; Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Julia Glass, The Whole World Over (London: Arrow Books, 2007); Abbott, The Future of Love; Jay McInerney, The Good Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); Schulman, A Day at the Beach; Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (London: Fourth Estate, 2008); Charlotte Vale Allen, Sudden Moves (Ontario: MIRA Books, 2004); Karen Kingsbury and Gary Smalley, Remember (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 2003); Maynard, The Usual Rules; Friedman, Playing Dad's Song; Prose, Bullyville; Hugh Nissenson, The Days of Awe (Naperville: Sourcebooks, 2005); Reynolds Price, The Good Priest's Son (New York: Scribner, 2006).

91 Abbott, 146–47.

92 Schulman, 67.

93 Ibid., 146, original emphasis.

94 Kingsbury, 187. This example is perhaps more disturbing than the others mentioned above because of the highly didactic intent of the book, which carries with it a strong pedagogical authorial intention to promote Christianity in the wake of the attacks. Accordingly, the line between the fictional responses of the characters and the actual belief of the author becomes somewhat blurred here.

95 Abbott, 171. This conflation of al Qaeda and the Taliban represents a further dehistoricizing tendency within a number of the texts considered. Abbott repeatedly returns to this confused issue of perpetration, whilst Bridget Marks, September: A Novel (Chicago: Volt Press, 2004), and Nissenson, The Days of Awe, somewhat inaccurately (or at least, simplistically) attribute 9/11 as an outcome of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

96 Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 78.

97 In his short story “Ghost Town,” Patrick McGrath offers a similarly scathing critique of the solipsistic climate surrounding the attacks, particularly as manifested in, and constituted by, psychoanalytic discourse.

98 WTC Tribute Center, http://www.tributewtc.org, accessed 14 June 2010.

99 Ibid.

100 This rather sporadic approach to curation is repeated at the USHMM in Washington, DC, where it is often unclear whether the objects exhibited are actually genuine artefacts or modern reconstructions. By contrast the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum exhaustively trace the provenance of each of their artefacts, giving a short biography of the person to which they are attributed and detailing the experience each owner had of the bombing.

101 Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 24.

102 Ernst van Alphen, “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma,” in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1999), 25.

103 WTC Tribute Center website.

104 Ibid.

105 Caruth, Explorations in Memory, 10.

106 Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 2.

107 Crownshaw, The Limits of Transference, 71–72. It should be noted that Crownshaw is here critiquing, rather than subscribing to, Caruth's reading of trauma.

108 Caruth, Explorations in Memory, 4.

109 Ibid., 5.

110 Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, 224–25.

111 Bassin, “A Not So Temporary Occupation,” 198. Bassin argues, “Being inside this violated and dismembered space of ground zero evoked terror and anguish … The rubble screams the collapse of individuality, security, and mastery that is impossible to represent.”

112 Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 136.

113 Richard Stammelman and Paul Williams both question the speed at which the contemporary drive to commemorate is pursued without adequate pause for reflection. As Stammelman comments, 9/11 has consequently become “an event already integrated into memory but not yet archived in history, an event caught in the space between memory and history”; an event, in other words, perpetually located at an indefinable Ground Zero. See Richard Stammelman, “September 11: Between Memory and History,” in Greenberg, Trauma at Home, 11–20; Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocity (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), 128.

114 This suspicion is reinforced by Ann Cvetkovich's commentary on the attacks. She tells us, “On September 11, I was in the midst of finishing a book about trauma … The events of September 11 and their aftermath have not changed what I know about trauma; they have confirmed it.” Ann Cvetkovitch, “Trauma Ongoing”, in Greenberg, Trauma at Home, 60–68. In the introduction to their collection, Coates, Rosenthal, and Schechter similarly reveal a fortuitous adaptation of a pre-existing project to fit the circumstances of the post-9/11 world. As they reveal, “September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds grew out of an interdisciplinary conference on the problem of the transgenerational transmission of trauma … In our original planning, which took place before 9/11, we sought to review the state of traumatic knowledge … After the terrorist attacks, the conference acquired a compelling urgency none of us had anticipated” (Robert Alan Glick, “Preface”, in Coates, Rosenthal and Schechter, Trauma and Human Bonds, viii–ix). The statements lead me to the uncomfortable suspicion that some theorists may have seized upon 9/11 to illuminate the phenomenon of trauma, rather than utilizing trauma (or traumatic paradigms) to illuminate 9/11.

115 Laub, “September 11, 2001,” 204.

116 Caruth, Explorations in Memory, 3.