Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11

Notes

301 NOTES Introduction 1. This is one of the greatest honors conferred on a 9/11 novel to date. Also in 2009 Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland was awarded the pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. 2. An interesting, transnational special issue on literature after 9/11 appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing in 2010. Modern Fiction Studies published a special issue ten years after the attacks. 3. My approach does not modify the conventional difference between the narrow understanding of values and social norms (morality) and the philosophy that negotiates these values (ethics). For a clear application of this distinction to fiction , see Wayne Booth: “The word ‘ethical’ may mistakenly suggest a project concentrating on quite limited moral standards: of honesty, perhaps, or of decency or tolerance. I am interested in a much broader topic, the entire range of effects on the ‘character’ or ‘person’ or ‘self.’ Moral judgments are only a small part of it. . . . For us here the word must cover all qualities in the character, or ethos, of authors and readers, whether these are judged as good or bad” (The Company We Keep 8). 4. On the political relevance and strategic power of translation as a humanistic and diplomatic tool, see Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, which argues in a post-9/11 context that “war is the continuation of extreme mistranslation or disagreement by other means . . . a condition of nontranslatability or translation failure at its most violent peak” (16). On mistranslation and intelligence in post-9/11 fiction, see chapter 5. 5. The texts I have chosen to discuss in this book have less to say about Iraq than might be expected, not because 9/11 literature has avoided the issue altogether (it hasn’t), but simply because fictional treatments of the Iraq War remain marginal to broader discussions of the post-9/11 condition. This may partly stem from the impulse to regard Iraq ethically as unrelated to the terrorist attacks. Where 9/11 and Iraq are intertwined, the narrative tilts toward an interpretation 302 notes to pages 36–49 of the war as a superfluous sequel to Vietnam or more vaguely as a traumatic case of misrecognition. See McEwan, Saturday; O’Hagan, Be Near Me. 6. Jonathan Crary, among others, has argued compellingly that the technological mechanisms and optical devices of a historical period as “sites of both knowledge and power” (7) influence the visual regime of contemporaneous arts. 7. See Banita, “Raymond Williams and Online Video.” 8. For an illustration of how superficially visual studies have incorporated ethical discourse, see Mitchell’s cursory remark on Levinas in his essay “Showing Seeing”: “Visual culture would find its primal scene, then, in what Emmanuel Levinas calls the face of the Other (beginning, I suppose, with the face of the Mother): the face-to-face encounter, the evidently hard-wired disposition to recognize the eyes of another organism (what Lacan and Sartre call the gaze)” (175). 9. Applying another of Levinas’s oppositions, vision corresponds to what he terms “the Saying,” defined as “the performative stating, proposing, or expressive position of myself facing the Other. It is a verbal or non-verbal ethical performance , whose essence cannot be caught in constative propositions.” By contrast , “the Said” (which I equate here to the image) “is a statement, assertion, or proposition” whose “truth or falsity can be ascertained” (Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction 7). 10. See Attridge 21. His definition of the Other is worth citing here: “Whatever its precise complexion, the other in these accounts is primarily an impingement from outside that challenges assumptions, habits, and values and that demands a response” (23). 11. For a definition of this concept, see Derrida. 12. Amy Kaplan defines historical exceptionalism as “the often heard claim that the world was radically altered by 9/11, that the world will never be the same, that Americans have lost their former innocence about their safety and invulnerability at home” (83). 13. Rancière defines politics as a system that dynamically includes the elements it has excluded: “Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part” (11). 14. As recently as 2011 Elizabeth Anker writes that “for the most part nonwhite characters are virtually absent from the 9/11 novel, an obstruction that mirrors American myopia as well as signals a damaging denial of that event’s global repercussions” (468). A critical myopia...