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  • Cultural Trauma as a Social Construct: 9/11 Fiction and the Epistemology of Communal Pain
  • Amir Khadem (bio)

“If there was one thing writers agreed about in response to 9/11,” notes Richard Gray in the opening page of his book After the Fall (2011), “it was the failure of language; the terrorist attacks made the tools of their trade seem absurd” (1). As the most recent, and arguably the most formidable, cultural trauma of the contemporary American society, the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 is treated by many scholars as an unrepresentable event, creating immense difficulties for writers to respond to, so much that their simplest tool, the language, would fail miserably. This approach to the aftermath of 9/11 is an extension of the general theory of trauma, developed mainly in the 1990s, most notably through works of Cathy Caruth (1995; 1996), Shoshana Felman (1993; with Dori Laub, 1992), and Kirby Farrell (1998). Under the influence of a poststructuralist-psychoanalytic trend of theory, the literary criticism of cultural trauma was initially established around interpretations of Second World War atrocities, especially the Holocaust, and then expanded to a wide range of social events that, in one way or another, left a deep impression on a society’s culture. It is based on the argument that when something horrible happens to a group of people, not ready to receive and digest its appalling enormity, the response lies deep under their consciousness without having any chance to be properly expressed. What is called trauma, then, is the result of both the original event and the anxiety of keeping its emotional and cognitive responses repressed in the unconscious. “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event,” writes Caruth, “but rather in the way it’s very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Unclaimed 4). In the next step, trauma becomes a cultural issue, bringing to light a general problem of human culture: the problem of representation. As Caruth elaborates, it is “in the equally widespread and bewildering encounter with trauma . . . that we can begin to recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential,” and so the main objective behind analyzing trauma is a “rethinking of reference” in human history (Unclaimed 11). In this sense, trauma brings about a valuable opportunity to discuss the more general issues of communication, memory, and representation in the modern human culture.

While it gained immense popularity in the 1990s, this approach to cultural trauma has been recently under severe criticism for either its self-celebratory attitude in using horrible human disasters as opportunities for abstract theoretical adventures, or its overextension of a problematic trope, whereby cultural trauma is loosely based on a metaphor for individual psychic trauma. These critiques have opened a gap to be filled [End Page 181] with newer, more robust theoretical methodologies to study trauma at a communal level. In these pages, I examine a social theory of cultural trauma that, instead of following poststructuralist and psychoanalytic approaches, is informed by cultural sociology. The goal is to assess this theory, point out its possible advantages, and investigate its potential in opening new paths for literary inquiry. In the next step, using this theoretical apparatus, an alternative angle in studying post-9/11 literature is proposed, detailed through an analysis of two novels, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008). This essay’s general argument stands in contrast to the established view that regards literature as inherently insufficient to represent trauma, invoking Theodor Adorno’s classic statement, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (34).1 Richard Gray’s aforementioned book quotes a poem by Suheir Hammad to explicitly claim that “no poetry . . . no prose . . . not one word” can be said in response to the terrorist event of 9/11(Gray 1; Hammad 139). But even claiming an event to be out of representation’s reach is itself a representation strategy. There is an irony that seems too obvious to note, when a poem claims that no poem can be written about the post-9/11...

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