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

5. Reading for the Pattern: Narrative, Data Mining, and the Transnational Ethics of Surveillance

251 5. READING FOR THE PATTERN Narrative, Data Mining, and the Transnational Ethics of Surveillance In the four-page chapter titled “Singularity” at the center of William Gibson ’s Pattern Recognition, the protagonist Cayce Pollard—whose father disappeared in Manhattan on September 11 and is presumed dead—witnesses the collapse of the Twin Towers concomitantly with the micro event of “a single petal fall, from a dead rose, in the tiny display window of an eccentric Spring Street dealer in antiques” (135). The episode eloquently exposes the singularity of the personal and intimate act of witnessing against the backdrop of global terror. Unlike the masses glued to their tv sets on September 11, Cayce is the “sole witness to this minute fall” (135) that replicates or, more precisely, anticipates the collapse of the towers on a reduced but all the more poignant scale. The falling petal exists in the realm of small, manageable objects (rather than that of national symbols of glass and steel), objects that Cayce has learned to cherish and observe closely. What the peaceful, slow-motion fall of the rose petal signifies amid the chaos of the city, with its blaring sirens, suicidal jumpers, and general anguish, is “the loneliness of objects. Their secret lives. Like seeing something move in a Cornell box” (136).1 More ominously, I would suggest, Cayce’s scrutiny of the micro world contained in the display window symbolically encapsulates the panoptic obsession triggered by the terrorist attacks. Gibson’s novel, along with a number of other post-9/11 fictions, describes a world riddled with suspicion and encompassed by a tight system of surveillance. Like Falling Man, In the Shadow of No Towers, and A Day at the Beach, these are novels about spectatorship, but with a key difference: while the recognition of the Other in DeLillo, Schulman, and Spiegelman revolves primarily 252 around seeing and responding to images of pain, these novels are all about being seen, about “visibility” as the barometer of belonging and citizenship in a post-9/11 “culture of control” (Garland). Beyond identifying spectatorship as a key constitutive element of modern subjectivity, they point toward the specific problems that this panoptic focus poses for the ethics of narrative.2 I argue that surveillance—whether as visual panopticon or postoptic data-mining system3 —can be used as a thematic and structural heuristic to interpret how post-9/11 literature dramatizes the ethical challenges posed by increased securitization to the public’s privacy rights. To illustrate this dynamic of discipline and suspicion, I investigate five narratives that portray and critique surveillance policies after 9/11: Walter Kirn’s The Unbinding, Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist , and Lorraine Adams’s Harbor, in addition to Barker’s Double Vision, which I briefly revisit. I should begin by noting that the panoptic impulse in fiction is by no means a recent development. From Charlotte Brontë to Muriel Spark, disciplinary aesthetics have not only emerged as a recurrent trope in fiction, but have also infiltrated narrative technique and literary form. Surveillance fictions are almost always sensitive to the technological and political implications of the vigilant processes they describe, as well as to the specificities of historical context.4 The most frequently invoked forerunner to contemporary fictions of surveillance is, of course, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, summoned and discussed with renewed urgency since 9/11 partly because, as David Brin remarks, “Orwell’s metaphors have been expanded beyond his initial portrayal of a Stalinist nightmarestate to include all worrisome accumulations of influence, authority, or unreciprocal transparency” (225). Despite the frequent adulteration of his themes—especially through the adoption of Big Brother as a quasi-mythological entertainment figure—Orwell does anticipate several aspects of the current war against terrorism, including permanent surveillance, unlimited and unwarranted detention for potential crimes, and torture. In Orwell’s Oceania “endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have acreading for the pattern 253 tually been committed, but are merely the wiping out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future” (181). Central to the novel is the technology of the telescreen, a piece of broadcast equipment that permanently streams propaganda content at an ambient level—the audience paying only scant attention as they perform their daily tasks—while monitoring the viewers: “You...