Contagion: Health, Fear, Sovereignty

6. Contagion of Intellectual Traditions in Post-9/11 Novels

149 Judith Butler’s 2004 essay collection Precarious Life opens with a clear and strong condemnation of post-9/11 censorship and antiintellectualism .1 In relation to Butler’s suggestive hypotheses, this chapter explores the ways in which two post-9/11 fiction works in prose try to comment on, evade, or outwit governmental and imperial mechanisms of a discourse against an open and intellectual debate in a post-9/11 United States. The chapter brings together an American writer’s novel, Claire Messud ’s The Emperor Children (2006), and a novel by a British writer, Zoë Heller’s The Believers (2009). Both novels are threaded by the socioecoContagion of Intellectual Traditions in Post-9/11 Novels Alberto S. Galindo I want your ugly. I want your disease. I want your everything As long as it’s free. —lady gaga 6 Alberto S. Galindo 150 nomic privilege that their respective characters have and the luxury that such freedom affords them when dealing with, coping with, and surviving the events of September 11 and their aftermath. Most of the main characters in these two novels form their narratives from the class position that the character Rosa in The Believers calls “bourgeois liberalism.”2 It is this bourgeois liberalism that becomes one of the central ideologies in both novels and then spreads metaphorically throughout the texts, similar to the spread of Communism as a metaphor of contagion during the Cold War.3 Thus, this chapter explores not the literal, bodily notion of contagion but rather the contagion of intellectual ideas, primarily the characters’ constant implicit and explicit acceptance of a bourgeois notion of liberalism in the aftermath of 9/11. The choice of two women writers and their nationalities is not serendipitous . It is, partly, a response to the observations made by scholars and critics such as Kristiaan Versluys, who writes: “It is also a matter of mere conjecture whether the new 9/11 fiction will remain the preserve of male white writers or whether it will be marked by more gender and ethnic diversity or acquire a more outspoken international dimension.”4 Besides the common ground both writers share, the novels are both third-person narratives concerned with the bonds and ties of bourgeois liberal families who are affected by the events of 9/11, and this, in turn, generates a fictional dialogue between the politics of both texts.5 Emerging from a character’s notion of bourgeois liberalism, this chapter also invokes the concept of ideology constructed in the novel through a digested version that several characters conceive based on some of Antonio Gramsci’s writings. The ideological apparatus is derived from and referenced by, in the case of The Believers, a famous quote attributed to Gramsci that serves as the epigraph to Heller’s novel: “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” The scope of a bourgeois liberalism and its hegemonic culture clearly expands through the texts in contrast or response to ideological premises that are feared and criticized by the characters in the present, such as Rosa’s previous interest in communist socialism, but that may have marked their lives in the past, as in the case of the patriarch in The Believers, who claims that his epitaph will be by Gramsci as well: “a pessimist because of intelligence and an optimist by will.”6 The privilege of these characters in The Believers, who quote Gramsci at will, Contagion of Intellectual Traditions in Post-9/11 Novels 151 creates an environment that allows for the construction of subtle metaphors of contagion, or social contagion as studied by sociologists.7 It is the epigraph’s question of modernity and illusions that permeates the characters in The Believers, but also in The Emperor’s Children, especially if seen through Gramsci’s notion that ideology—the bourgeois liberalism mentioned here as well as the culture indispensable to maintaining such liberalism—does create these characters and provoke them to act. Such political and intellectual action can be read in the novels particularly because both texts push for public intellectuals or figures who try to take charge of ideological practices and their respective intellectual debates.8 The characters in The Emperor’s Children fear the anti-intellectualism and censorship that Butler studies in Precarious Life, and in order to avoid these, they want to spread intellectualism, in its privileged and bourgeois version. The response to...