Contemporary Literature

Hinting at the crisis in representation in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Jacques Derrida asserts that what he names “the event” is a dualfeatured phenomenon constituted “of the ‘thing’ itself (that which happens or comes) and the impression (itself at once ‘spontaneous’ and ‘controlled’) that is given, left, or made by the so-called ‘thing’” (89). Driving a cleft between the thing and its impression, Derrida says that “the impression is ‘informed,’ in both senses of the word: a predominant system gave it form, and this form then gets run through an organized information machine (language, communication, rhetoric, image, media, and so on). . . . [which] is from the very outset political, technical, economic” (89). In contrast to the informed impression, the event is incomprehensible: “The event is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me. . . the event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend” (90). The responses to the 9/11 attacks, originating from both the state apparatus and the ethical-aesthetic sphere, belong to the realm of the impression and are thus attempts to appropriate the event into comprehensible modes of narration that serve the purposes of power, hegemony, and resistance.¹ [End Page 517]

I wish to explore how the subgenre of the American 9/11 novel represents the event by “instantiating a narrative framework that could mark a separation between the event and its account” (Houen 422).² I intend to tease out the ways in which the subgenre responds, in an imperfect and oblique way, to the instrumentalization of the aesthetic by the state. In light of David Palumbo-Liu’s observation that after the attacks, the state has deployed the “Imagination for particular, antihumanistic purposes. . . into specifically strategic and destructive modes of thinking, even while appropriating the rhetoric of the aesthetic” (154), the issue, then, is in what ways the American 9/11 novel has adumbrated a response. I will focus on the concept-metaphor of the domestic to unpack the conflicted and often contradictory responses of the 9/11 novel produced in the United States.

In her nuanced analysis of the American cultural imaginary after 9/11, Susan Faludi, borrowing a zoological metaphor, argues that the nation’s responses to the terrorist attacks repeat a familiar pattern: “The ways that we act, say, in response to a crisis can recapitulate in quick time the centuries-long evolution of our character as a society and of the mythologies we live by. September 11 presented just such a crisis” (13).³ The 9/11 novel’s predilection for the concept-metaphor of the domestic, with all the attendant subthemes of “nesting,” “security moms,” female victimhood, and regenerated masculinity, is prima facie evidence of its participation in what Faludi calls a recursive process of “rewrite” (199) that is obliquely opposed to the ethical-aesthetic [End Page 518] project of imagining future alterities.⁴ To be sure, Faludi is not alone in noting the nation’s indulgence in “rewrite” as opposed to a process of revision which might lead to the forging of new strategies of response. For instance, Donald Pease, in his analysis of the “transformational grammar” (“Global Homeland State” 1) constructed by the state to reshape public perceptions after the terrorist attacks notes that the phrases used by President George W. Bush in his September 20, 2001 address “alluded to mythological themes embedded within the governing fictions” (2). The ambivalent responses of the American 9/11 novel both participate in and resist this cultural dominant.

In an argument consonant with Faludi’s analysis, Richard Gray asserts that the literary yield in the United States after the attacks suffers from a major weakness: 9/11 fiction resorts to “a familiar romance pattern—in which couples meet, romantic and domestic problems follow, to be concluded in reconciliation or rupture—books like this. . . simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures. The crisis is, in every sense of the word, domesticated” (134). According to Gray, the subgenre evades the responsibility of generating innovative imaginative structures reflecting this new crisis and instead adopts...