A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray

Richard Gray’s “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis” offers a sharp and necessary diagnosis of the American novel since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Erudite and wide-ranging, Gray’s essay combines a sense of historical sweep with a keen understanding of the specific dilemmas of the present. Particularly concerned with the ethics of literature—that is, with literature’s potential engagement with questions of difference, otherness, and strangeness—Gray underscores the failures of most 9/11 novels to move beyond “the preliminary stages of trauma” by doing more than simply “registering that something traumatic . . . has happened.” A central problem, as Gray convincingly demonstrates, is that while American novelists have, along with all manner of pundits, announced the dawn of a new era following the attacks on New York and Washington D.C., the form of their works does not bear witness to fundamental change; rather, these works “assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures.” Gray does not argue for a full break or discontinuity between the pre- and post-9/11 worlds—indeed, he repeatedly and brilliantly finds literary antecedents for current concerns. Instead, acknowledging that our moment combines novelty and continuity, he stresses the need for what Bakhtin would call a “radical reaccentuation” of given forms: “some kind of alteration of imaginative structures is required to register the contemporary crisis,” as is “the ability and willingness imaginatively to act on that recognition.”

However, such a reaccentuation has not taken place. The fiction of 9/11 demonstrates instead a failure of the imagination. Gray’s diagnosis of failure is, in my opinion, largely correct for the earliest fictional responses to America’s recent “trauma.” His alternative—a “deterritorialized” grappling with otherness—is, I will argue, both necessary and not entirely sufficient. While Gray’s model for the kind of deterritorialization of the novel he would like to see in the wake of 9/11 derives from recent immigrant fictions that open up and hybridize American culture, I call for a supplementary form of deterritorialization. In addition to Gray’s model of critical multiculturalism, we need a fiction of international relations and extraterritorial citizenship. If Gray’s account tends toward the centripetal—an account of the world’s movement toward America—I propose a complementary centrifugal mapping that charts the outward movement of American power. The most difficult thing for citizens of the US empire to grasp is not the internal difference of their motley multiculture, but the prosthetic reach of that empire into other worlds.

The failure Gray diagnoses is not simply a formal one, but also ultimately a political one. In place of the necessary imaginative reworking Gray calls for, he finds that in novels treating 9/11 by US-based writers, “The crisis is, in every sense of the word, domesticated.” Post-9/11 fiction frequently claims to be grappling with public and collective history: “Private life shrank to nothing,” reflects a character in Deborah Eisenberg’s collection Twilight of the Superheroes (2006); “all life had become public,” echoes another in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (2007) (qtd in Gray). Despite such sentiments, however, Gray points out that in most of those works “all life . . . is personal; cataclysmic public events are measured purely and simply in terms of their impact on the emotional entanglements of their protagonists.” Gray rightly laments the lack of mediation in the recent spate of 9/11 fiction: “many of the texts that try to bear witness to contemporary events vacillate . . . between large rhetorical gestures acknowledging trauma and retreat into domestic detail. The link between the two is tenuous, reducing a turning point in national and international history to little more than a stage in a sentimental education.”

Numerous recent novels illustrate this tendency, perhaps none better than Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005), a relatively early fictional response that Gray does not discuss. Schwartz’s novel suggests that part of the turn toward the domestic may come as a response to a perceived corruption of the [End...