Abstract
In her 2012 article ‘The Storytellers of Empire’, Kamila Shamsie argues that ‘with pitifully few exceptions, the [American] 9/11 novel looks at 9/11 the day itself, in New York — think of the most acclaimed novels in that genre: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’.1 This is not to say, Shamsie continues, that ‘September 11, the day itself in New York, is not itself a worthy subject for fiction’.2 Rather, her point is that ‘just as the day itself is only one part of the genre of 9/11 nonfiction books, so it should be with fiction’.3 This desire for novelists to shift their fictional framing of September 11, in a way that places ‘the day itself’ into a complex geopolitical context, is one that is shared by other critics also. Michael Rothberg has argued that ‘[w]hat we need from 9/11 novels are cognitive maps that imagine how US citizenship looks and feels beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, both for Americans and for others’.4 Likewise, as I mentioned in the Introduction, Richard Gray calls upon American novelists to perform a literary ‘enactment of difference’.5 He draws attention to a minority of non-canonical post-9/11 texts that, in his view, ‘reconfigure language, the themes and tropes of American writing in terms that go way beyond bipolar, biracial models. In the process, they become a lexical equivalent of the immigrant encounter, transforming their literary environs just as they are transformed by them — and, in effect, force us to rethink 9/11.’6
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Notes
Michael Rothberg, ‘A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray’, American Literary History, 21.1 (2009), p. 158.
Richard Gray, After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 30.
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), p. 33.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), p. 147.
Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 386.
James Peacock, Jonathan Lethem (Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 152.
Jonathan Lethem, ‘My Egyptian Cousin’, in The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), p. 233.
Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn (New York: Vintage, 1999), p. 1.
Jonathan Lethem, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’, in Ecstasy of Influence, p. 98. It is worth noting here that Heidegger’s notion of ‘enframing’ is rather different from that of the ‘world picture’ that I referred to in the Introduction. While the latter potentially enables a broadening of perspective, ‘enframing’ is more in line with Butler’s restricting frame (although it pertains specifically to the effects of technology upon perception): ‘Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standingreserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological.’ Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, trans. William Lovitt, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. William Lovitt (New York and London: Garland, 1977), p. 20.
Lethem might here be said to be writing in what Nicoline Timmer, with reference to David Foster Wallace, has described as a ‘post-postmodern’ mode of ‘critical fiction’: that is, a kind of contemporary fictional writing ‘that shows a heightened awareness of the twists and turns of critical theory of the last few decades, and very “knowingly” … [works] through some of the most arresting contradictions and paradoxes of postmodern thought’. Nicoline Timmer, Do You Feel It Too?: The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), p. 23.
See for example: Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2005);
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (London: Vintage, 1994);
Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Hutchinson, 1980).
Kalí Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 7.
American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM III-R), qtd in Laura S. Brown, ‘Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 100.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 6.
Robert Hampson has made a similar argument about Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of that novel: ‘As in those gestalt drawings that can be read as either a vase or two profiles, as foreground and background change places, here language that is offered as figurative suddenly asserts its literal meaning, and this kind of unsettling of language proves to be a characteristic feature of Marlow’s narration.’ Robert Hampson, ‘Introduction’, in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), p. xxx. It is worth noting that Conrad’s novella is another well-known text that employs a Buellian ‘observer-hero’ narrative, in this instance to illustrate a division at the heart of the European colonial self.
Although Lethem draws heavily on techniques that might be described as ‘postmodern’ or ‘deconstructive’, this emphasis on the authentication of reality simultaneously comes close to resembling what Charles Taylor (a critic of both schools of thought) has described as a contemporary imperative to ‘fight[] over the meaning of authenticity …. The struggle ought not to be over authenticity, for or against, but about it, defining its proper meaning.’ Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 72–3.
Derek Attridge, ‘Context, Idioculture, Invention’, New Literary History, 42.4 (2011), pp. 682–3.
Lethem, Chronic City, p. 126. See also Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Jonathan Culler, qtd in Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (New York: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 106.
Jonathan Lethem, ‘You Don’t Know Dick’, in The Disappointment Artist, and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 77. See also Erik Davis, ‘Chronic Citizen: Jonathan Lethem on P.K. Dick, Why Novels are Weird Technology, and Constructed Realities’, h+ Magazine, 18 December 2009 http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/12/18/chronic-citizen-jonathan-lethem-pk-dick-why-novels-are-weird-technology-a/.
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–3.
Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 73.
Teju Cole, Open City (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), pp. 170–1.
Jacques Derrida, ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, trans. Mark Dooley, in Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, ed. Simon Critchley (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 4.
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 106; 76–7.
Pieter Vermeulen, ‘Flights of Memory: Teju Cole’s Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Modern Literature, 37.1 (2013), p. 42.
Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 47.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 34. The website Poetry Genius has published a page dedicated to the constellation of literary and other artistic and cultural references in Open City. The site contains an interactive excerpt from the novel (verified by Cole himself), and users are able to click on sections of it to reveal passages from an eclectic mix of literature, opera and hip-hop that Cole has consciously evoked in the text. ‘Teju Cole — Open City (Excerpt)’, Poetry Genius website http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Teju-cole-open-city-excerpt-lyrics.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 247.
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 163.
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 13. As Stef Craps notes in Postcolonial Witnessing, ‘screen memory’ has also been explored by other memory theorists in recent years; see esp.: Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press); Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘Schindler’s List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory’, Critical Inquiry, 22.2 (1996), pp. 292–312; Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing, p. 79. In this chapter, I use the term in the sense described by Rothberg, but it is worth noting that Freud’s original definition is a little more specific. In his 1899 treatise, ‘Screen Memories’, he defines the phenomenon as ‘[r]ecollection … whose value lies in the fact that it represents in the memory impressions and thoughts of a later date whose content is connected with its own by symbolic or similar links’ (my emphasis).
Sigmund Freud, ‘Screen Memories’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume III (1893–1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1995), p. 316.
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© 2015 Daniel O’Gorman
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O’Gorman, D. (2015). Gazing Inward in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City and Teju Cole’s Open City . In: Fictions of the War on Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137506184_3
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