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2. Sex and Sense: McGrath, Tristram, and Psychoanalysis from Ground Zero to Abu Ghraib
- University of Nebraska Press
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109 2. SEX AND SENSE McGrath, Tristram, and Psychoanalysis from Ground Zero to Abu Ghraib In his influential essay “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis,” Richard Gray underscores the failure of post-9/11 literature to formally articulate the crisis of imagination precipitated by the terrorist attacks. Gray encapsulates his position in asserting that 9/11 narratives such as Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man “simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures. The crisis is, in every sense of the word, domesticated” (134). Rachel Greenwald Smith continues this argument when she states that 9/11 novels “articulate the attacks as world-changing while remaining formally familiar” in ways that reflect the post-9/11 historical conditions in the United States, particularly the misuse of the attacks for “political and economic goals that were more ideologically continuous than disruptive” (155). In other words, Greenwald Smith justifies the reluctance of post-9/11 fiction to engage in formal experimentation or posttraumatic renewal by invoking “the expansion of existing political policies” (159) in the years following the attacks. My discussion of the falling man trope, which post-9/11 writing has metabolized into a conventionally emplotted and answerable (if ultimately unfillable) ethical challenge, partly confirms Gray’s and Greenwald Smith’s diagnosis. Yet Spiegelman’s and Schulman’s gloss on the mechanics of substitution, transference, and self-restraint suggests that the task of responding to September 11 may also result in an oblique (and all the more interesting) evacuation of the familiar. It is precisely by drawing on clichéd narrative tropes that post-9/11 fiction manages to disrupt, with the violence of surprise, the benign domesticity 110 sex and sense of the terrorist plot as a painful yet ultimately surmountable personal and national crisis. The challenge of representing the attacks does not relate to formal strategies alone, which are merely an envelope for rhetorical tropes that may insidiously prey on the conventional, planting the seeds of a productive and aesthetically experimental ethical disorientation. Gray and Greenwald Smith do not entertain the possibility that even though in many fictions since 2001 the traumatic events of 9/11 “are measured purely and simply in terms of their impact on the emotional entanglements of their protagonists” (R. Gray 134), the transference of the public into the personal (with all the clinical and aesthetic connotations such transference contains) may constitute precisely the kind of defamiliarizing, formally innovative strategy they had been seeking. And even though Greenwald Smith compellingly locates the transformative aspects of 9/11 fiction in disorienting corporeal sensations and affective provocations, she remains oddly uninterested in the psychosexual, which strikes me as a core site for the emergence of uneasy bodily and emotional shifts. In what follows I consider Patrick McGrath’s novella “Ground Zero” and Claire Tristram’s novel After to show that far from merely oscillating “between large rhetorical gestures acknowledging trauma and retreat into domestic detail . . . reducing a turning point in national and international history to little more than a stage in a sentimental education” (R. Gray 134), fiction that bears witness to the 9/11 events can indeed enrich our understanding of trauma and its mediation. Rather than allowing “a kind of imaginative paralysis” (135), in McGrath and Tristram the ethical encounter with the Other becomes bound up—with the precision and elusiveness of allegory—with narrativization itself, particularly with that most obsessively introspective of narratives, psychoanalysis, as well as with the discomfiting vectors of sexual desire both within and outside the analytic relationship, in the bedroom, and on the geopolitical world stage. McGrath reworks the strategies of allegory to address unmediated trauma, and in doing so he neither simplifies that trauma nor abolishes what critics such as Cathy Caruth have proposed as its determining feature , “the impossibility of . . . direct access” (Trauma 4). In fact allegory [35.153.134.169] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:28 GMT) 111 sex and sense strikes me as a particularly apt category in the discussion of trauma due to the unreadability built into the concept, which denotes, in Paul de Man’s formulation, the very impossibility of reading. De Man’s phrasing can be taken to describe as much the workings of allegory as those of trauma: “The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition . . . of a previous sign with which it can never coincide...