Posttraumatic reflection in the american post – 9/11 novel

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

Federal autonomous educational institution of higher professional education

National research university higher school of economics

Department of foreign languages

Posttraumatic reflection in the american post - 9/11 novel

Raevskaya Anna Mikhailovna

Contents

Introduction

1. Theoretical Framework of Trauma and Postraumatic Prose

1.1 The Concept of Trauma: Individual, Collective, Cultural

1.2 American Novel of the XX-XXI Centuries in the Context of Posttraumatic Prose

1.3 American Post-9/11 Novel

2. J.S. Foer: Trauma through Generations

2.1 The story of Oscar: Search of Identity after Trauma

2.2 Trauma through Generations

2.3 A Motif of the a Healing Journey in the Novel

3. D. Delillo: Effects of the Shock Wave

3.1 Tragedy through the Eyes of the Beholder

3.2 Trauma that Changed Everyone

3.3 The Shift of Focalization in the Novel: the Attack from a Terrorist's Point of View

4. E.L. Doctorow: Talking to a Therapist

4.1 The Narration in the Form of Monologue: a Lifelong Tragedy

4.2 The Political in the Novel

4.3 Personal and National Narratives in the Novel

Conclusion

References

Introduction

American literature does have a solid tradition of posttraumatic prose - fiction which observes, analyzes, sometimes just ascertains the fact, or tries to explain traumatic events influenced lives of million people, whole nations, and a single person.

World War I left an indelible mark on the fate of many generations, changed the moral order of many countries and nationalities. The war that broke out overseas shocked the younger generation of Americans with thousands of deaths and horrific destruction, struck by its senselessness and barbaric weapons that were used against all living things. The postwar country they had once considered their home collapsed like a house of cards. There were only a handful of young people, so unnecessary and lost, living aimlessly their days.

Such sentiments flooded many cultural aspects of life in the 1920s, including literature. Many writers have realized that the former norms are no longer appropriate, and the former criteria of writing have outlived themselves completely. They criticized the country and the government, and in the end they felt lost. Finding meaning in anything for them has become an insoluble problem which was reflected in numerous pieces of literary art by the writers of the Lost Generation. Members of the Lost Generation include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway etc. The common themes were associated with the problem of World War I and post-war time in the country, the great trauma that the entire world experienced, and the nation which is not able to excuse or explain the war, to get over the changings of consequences. Also the themes of decadence, the trivial lifestyle of the wealthy, and the American dream appeared in the novels discussing how people was trying to start leaving new life and failed to understand and accept post-war America.

American literature has a very rich tradition of the novel about the World War II. Here is, for example, realistic "Across the River and into the Trees" by E. Hemingway, "From Here to Eternity" by J. Jones, I. Show's "The Young Lions", N. Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead",tending to the naturalism, semi-fantastic "Slaughterhouse-Five" by K. Vonnegut, and other works. All these novels are different in style, in creative manner of their authors, in the place occupied by them in American literature. But, despite all the dissimilarity, they are united by one feature that allows us to talk about the US military novel as a single holistic phenomenon. This feature is a critical, often satirical anti-war orientation, which to some extent is inherent in each of these works (Malanchuk, 1981).

Taking into account the distinctive features of the military experience of America, the socio-political situation and the literary context, there were raised a wide range of questions in the American fiction about World War II. How to perceive the scale of industrial destruction of people (the Holocaust and Hiroshima); how to understand the global character and nature of the War; what is the role of an ordinary soldier on the War; who is an enemy, and who is a friend? As a result, these issues created the new direction of African-American poetry of protest, the emergence of American poetry of the Holocaust, the new tone of the language of military novel where there can be traced the feeling of frustration, skepticism, pessimistic and satirical view of the reality of war. Methods of artistic decision, as well as specifically American themes (African-American poetry, the response to Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and the Holocaust) make up the national identity of the US literature about the World War II (Nikiforov, 2013).

Soon after the victory over Nazism the Cold War began, distinguished not only by military but also by severe ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. For American fiction it was a reason to comprehend a number of burning questions on the national identity, international relationships, justice, and, naturally, collective trauma preceding the birth of another literary movement, Beat Generation. The Beats, who appeared not only as a literary movement but also as an ideological group, immediately became oppositionists to the values and way of life existing in American society: conformism, `brainwashing' of the mass media, hypocrisy of American `public opinion'. The political views of the beat generation were expressed in sharp criticism of the `mainstream society', a society with a lack of spontaneity and the ability to rejoice, with its conformism and repression, with a sense of doom, and especially with its militarism of the Cold War (James, 1989). Allen Ginsberg's `Howl', William S. Burroughs's `Naked Lunch', and Jack Kerouac's `On the Road' are among the best known examples of Beat literature.

Lately, in the 70th the response to the Cold War was realized in the postmodernist novel of E. L. Doctorow `The Book of Daniel'. The novel is based on the criminal case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the only Americans who were condemned to die in the electric chair on charges of espionage and the transmission important data about the nuclear weapons of the United States to Soviet intelligence in 1953. By combining documentary and fictional characters, Doctorow interprets his vision of history and expresses his attitude to the social role of art and literature (Chernetsova, 2016).

The next turmoil was not long in coming. The Vietnam War broke out in 1959. There were written much more books about it than about any other war attended by the United States. Most of them were written by authors who took part in the conflict themselves. It is necessary to highlight the great variety of Vietnam War literature, which was expressed not only in the authors ' attempts to turn to the experience of the US participation in the Vietnam war, using various literary genres - prose, poetry, plays, autobiographical works, documentary based on personal experience created by the participants of the Vietnam War. Among other examples of American prose on the War we can point out Graham Greene's `The Quiet American', `The Ugly American' by Eugene L. Burdick and William J. Lederer, a series of adventure novels, such as `Search and Destroy by Irwin P. Blacker, `The Last Bridge by Brian Garfield, Robin Moore's Green Berets etc. The diversity was also manifested in the extremely broad thematic scope, the desire to show the war from different sides, not only from outside, but also through the prism of the psychology of its participants, through the inner world of man. In this sense, the literature devoted to the War in Vietnam, allows us to create an idea of the atmosphere that has developed around the participation of the United States in this armed conflict and to feel the emotional component of the War in Vietnam to a much greater extent than other layers of American culture.

One of the most outstanding novels raising a topic of the Vietnam War is the seventh novel by John Irving, `A Prayer for Owen Meany'. It `tells a religious story, though a religious story set against the twin backgrounds of the Vietnam War and an identifiably Irvingesque landscape of oddball characters and grotesque occurrences' (Bernstein, 1989). It is also a politically colored book as it deals with such important issues as social justice, the Iran-contra affair, satire on American life and `the culture of greed'. In the novel we can trace the characteristics of this atonement motif (Weaver, 2011) which will also take place in another novel analyzed in this paper, the one by E. L. Doctorow.

We briefly discussed the American literary tradition associated with collective trauma which can be predominantly traced in the post-war novels. The modern trauma-fiction deals not only with the topic of war but also with terrorism as a global problem of our time.

1.3 American Post-9/11 Novel

On September, 11, 2001 a series of terrorist attacks were committed in the USA, the biggest of which were in the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan. This event of global significance has placed a mark on all spheres of Americans' life and the rest of the world. Literature has never been able to stay away from such appalling catastrophes. Undoubtedly, in attempt to reflect fillings of those who witnessed the event and their own attitude towards the situation in the country, contemporary writers published a lot of works, many of which became truly pieces of art.

When New York City was attacked, intellectual community reacted immediately, in a form of news reports, commentaries, and personal essays (see e.g., DeLillo, 2001; Mailer, 2013). Of course, the writers of fiction, poetry, and dramatic prose have responded to 9/11 as well (Baer & Baer, 2002). Political novels are one of the central part of American literary tradition, that is why one could reasonably expect `a veritable boom' of passionate and acute novels about 9/11 (Andersen, 2008). Nevertheless, it took novels a while to be written and published because "a deliberate delay in the face of pressures to offer immediate findings is received as a mark of literary quality in a culture of mass communication and instant replay" (Keniston & Quinn, 2013). And yet trauma must be consciously grasped in memory in order to be cured. In other words, traumatic memory must be turned into narrative memory (Versluys, 2009). Later, many works discussing the issue of terror and, in particular, this tragic event were published and enriched such an emerging genre as trauma fiction, or trauma novel. As Granofsky (1995) explained, the trauma novel differs from other novels by "the exploration through the agency of literary symbolism of the individual experience of collective trauma, either actual events of the past, alarming tendencies of the present, or imagined horrors of the future".

Three outstanding examples of the trauma novel will be analyzed in this paper. The first of them, `Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close', was written by J. S. Foer in 2005; it produced a significant resonance in the literary world having been both praised and criticized (Verbestel, 2010). Within the rich complexity of the text, the author moves at will from scene to scene in the past three-quarters of a century to tell the story of a family who lived through a major trauma (Ingersoll, 2009). The novel describes the life of one family after the tragedy of 9/11 killed the father. In general, this work is about how people find love, which becomes a salvation from the terrible reality. So, not only did the main character Oscar Shell find his grandfather, but also he did realize how much his mother loved him. Grandmother and grandfather, years later, found each other again. And it is obvious that this is not a story about loneliness and loss of a person in a huge city, but about how love can save a person from loneliness and help to survive a catastrophe (Karasik, 2011). Foer reconciles the photographic and traumatic history of the event by imagining the possibility of another life in a fictional world (Mauro, 2011) when Oscar is flipping through the footage in reverse order and it seems that the man does not fall but soars.

The second novel, `Falling Man', created by D. DeLillo appeared in 2007. As in the previous novel, the author somehow constructs the narration around the visual record of the attacks, the image of a man falling out of the tower's window. DeLillo extracts the picture from the public memory by converting it into a written form. Golimowska (2016) considers these two novels through a lens of life in the metropolis after 9/11. She draws a parallel between changes in the life of characters and changes in New York settings after the tragedy. However, according to Prozorov (2006), Delillo is not as much interested in social and political, as in psychological and existential causes and consequences of destruction of the Twin Towers. The characters in the novel are searching for some spiritual therapy, which would help them to deal with the shock. They are trying to start over, to heal the wounds, to reconnect with the loved ones, to understand the new world and even understand the `other side' through the study of Muslim culture.

The last novel, by E. L. Doctorow - `Andrew's Brain' - was written in 2014, a year before his death. Having a form of the dialog with a therapist (or even of the protagonist with himself), the novel creates opportunities for personal stories to be connected with the national narrative (Naydan, 2017). It is not the first novel of Doctorow where he emerged as a master of postmodern prose by interpreting his vision of history and presenting an attitude to the social role of art and literature (Chernetsova, 2016). `Andrew's Brain' is novel-memory book, a retrospective, in which the protagonist looks back over his life to figure out how he came to be wherever he is and to recognize that he has been responsible for disasters all his life, without having meant to do harm (Karlina, 2005). Doctorow's art has traditionally attracted the attention of many literary scholars (Harpham, 1985; Harris, 2001; Jameson, 1991; Kravchenko, 2017). However, due to the recency of the event and the book itself, `Andrew's Brain' was not exposed to deep and thorough analysis so far.

The following section of the research paper will describe and analyze the chosen novels dedicating the separate paragraph to each of them.

2. J.S. Foer: Trauma through Generations

Foer's novel can be defined as an `initiation novel'. This type of the novel involves the existential search for a meaning in life and dramatic changes of personality in the process of the search, unfolding according to the initiation ritual, which involves overcoming three stages: preparing for the difficult ordeal, symbolic death and `rebirth' in a new status. The main carriers of the genre of the novel are the system of characters (the hero-adept, mentor or mediator and Virgo), the storyline structure of the search, the space-time organization based on the antithesis of the two worlds (Boriseeva, 2014).

The transition of the individual from one stage of development to another is an important phase in the initiation novel. The driving mechanism for a nine-years-old boy Oscar, the protagonist of the novel, is his childhood pain because of the loss of his father in the terrorist attacks of September, 11 and feeling guilty for missing the opportunity to talk to him for the last time. Oscar is a kind boy with a rich imagination and a subtle sense of humor. He is interested in the unusual things and see the world much broader than others.

`I spent Thursday's recess in the library, reading the new issue of American Drummer, which Librarian Higgins orders especially for me. It was boring. I went to the science lab, to see if Mr. Powers would do some experiments with me.' Foer, J. S. (2005). Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, pp. 190-192.

He is very gifted and developed, which in the conditions of the school turns him into a constant target for offensive jokes.

`Jimmy Snyder pushed my shoulder and said, 'Say your mom's a whore.' I said, 'Your mom's a whore.' He said, 'Say your mom's a whore.' I said, 'Your mom's a whore.'' Ibid, p. 192.

So he has not very much friends of the same age, but it's easy for him to find a common language with adults. However, despite the rich communicative skills, the death of his father, with whom Oscar had the warmest and the most trusting relationships, exacerbated the inherent loneliness of the boy. In the case of Oscar the traumatic effects of 9/11 find physical expression too: like the hero of `The Catcher in the Rye' Holden Caulfield, who broke with his fist all the windows in the garage after the death of his younger brother, the young hero of Foer deliberately gives himself the bruises after each hard memory about `Black Tuesday'.

The initiation novel incorporates the structures of the quest story. Such an adventurous feature as the motif of the quest and search is one of the main in the work: sorting out the things of the deceased father, Oscar finds an envelope with the inscription `Black' and the key hidden inside. Oscar decides to contact each person with the name of Black in New York to find the lock to which the key fits. Oscar overcomes a series of tests trying to figure out the mystery but along the way it turns out that he explores the people he met, their characters, fates and, finally, himself. It is the path of knowledge and acceptance. At the end of the novel Oskar experiences catharsis associated with it, he learns one of the main lessons of life: to let go of things, to move on. He grows up and that is his initiation.

2.2 Trauma through Generations

On September 11, 2001, Oscar's father managed to call home several times and leave five short messages on the answering machine, in which the last hours of his life are concentrated. In order not to aggravate the disorder of the mother, Oscar bought a new phone, hid the old one and now secretly listens to the message. The living voice of the forever lost father addressed to him is a terrible paradox of reality, haunting Oscar and becoming the starting point for both his disorder and his healing journey at the same time.

Despite his young age, Oscar has the ability to study his shocks thoughtfully. In other words, from the very beginning he is aware of the psychological trauma that affects every day of his life after September, 11. Learning to analyze the memories that resurrect the touching episodes of his relationship with his father, Oscar gradually overcomes the traumatic impact of the disaster and hardly finds a temporarily lost thirst for future and happiness. Similarly, a return to the memory of the horrors of Dresden, provoked by the tragedy of 9/11, gives Oscar's grandparents the opportunity to come to terms with the dark past and the hard reality.

Without realizing it, Oscar performs actions that have a healing effect on him, thus passing through several stages of acceptance. Wise beyond his age, nevertheless, Oscar remains a child. That is why intuitively he chooses the resistance in the form of game. Before the tragic events of 9/11, he adored the reconnaissance expeditions in New York, which his father had invented for him.

`A great game that Dad and I would sometimes play on Sundays was Reconnaissance Expedition. Sometimes the Reconnaissance Expeditions were extremely simple, like when he told me to bring back something from every decade in the twentieth century - I was clever and brought back a rock - and sometimes they were incredibly complicated and would go on for a couple of weeks.' Ibid, p. 8.

The logical continuation of those fascinating wanderings is Oscar's independent travels around the city in order to solve the mystery of the key and the card with the name `Black' found in his father's closet after his death. Symbolically, the existential search for meanings, which Oscar experiences, are reflected in a real trip to the locations of the city as if he would travel to locations of his memory. These journeys and unexpected acquaintances with the various Blacks, which Oscar gets during searches, help the little hero in fight against ghosts of the past and phobias of the present.

Another possible means of overcoming the injuries of `Black Tuesday' is creativity. The loss of a loves one encourages the characters to throw out the accumulated emotions, to express themselves through the artistic word. According to Foer, words are not able to express appropriately the tragedy of 9/11, but can ease its severity, that is, the process of writing carries a salutary effect. Oscar's confession, made at the beginning of the novel, is a proof:

`A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.' Ibid, p. 11.

Moreover, Oscar uses his rich imagination to `correct' the reality. He comes up with wild inventions which might have prevented the death of his father and would help other people to survive. Some of these inventions indicate his phobias and at the same time allow Oscar to get rid of fears (of elevators, skyscrapers, heights etc.) which he got after the tragedy. Actually, the whole story begins from the invention of a teakettle with Dad's voice. One more example:

`Sometimes I think it would be weird if there were a skyscraper that moved up and down while its elevator stayed in place. So if you wanted to go to the ninety-fifth floor, you'd just press the 95 button and the ninety-fifth floor would come to you.' Ibid, p. 3.

Behind the naive, and sometimes funny, inventions of the child, there is the fear of reality. The Oscar's healing journey can be also traced within his relationships with his mother. On the one hand, he feels guilty about having hidden the telephone without saying to mom anything about father's last messages. On the other hand, he blames her for having stopped loving his father, for being with her `friend' Ron. There are the Freudian motifs in the novel, but they are soft and not pronounced. Being aware of the issues of sex, Oscar perceives it emotionlessly, on a purely rational level. It seems to the boy that the mother, busy with work, accepting the friendship of another man, betrayed both his father and him. His loneliness becomes unbearable. That ambiguity even made him say terrible things for which he feels sorry later:

'Either promise me you'll never fall in love again, or I'm going to stop loving you.' 'You're not being fair.' 'I don't have to be fair! I'm your son!' … And then I said something that I wasn't planning on saying, and didn't even want to say. … 'If I could have chosen, I would have chosen you!' Ibid, p. 171.

However, in the end Oscar found out that his mother knew everything from the very beginning and even helped him, saying to all `Black's about his situation. A child begins to sympathize her, understand her feelings, forgive her and himself too. Thus, the tragedy separates them and joins together again in order to go through the common pain.

The storyline with Oscar's grandfather also plays a significant role on his way of overcoming the crisis. Each of them is experiencing the incident in their own way but this gives them a chance to correct the mistakes. At the end of the novel, Oscar and his grandfather dig an empty coffin for Thomas Shell Sr. to fill it with letters not sent to his son. This ritual aims at healing, as well as the last scene where Oscar rips out the pages of the diary named `Stuff That Happened to Me' and places them in reverse order so that the falling person in the photos soars up. It may symbolize the transfer of painful past into narrative memory.

The composition of the novel is peculiar, in addition to the parallel narrative, it includes graphic paralinguistic means, which are expressed in the diary, which Oscar writes, including photos related to the events of his life. For example, there he puts in a picture of a woman he met while trying to know the fate of the found key; a doorknob; a photo of a man falling from the tower of the shopping center; a portrait of Stephen Hawking, to whom Oscar writes letters and receives a full answer at the end of the novel. Foer also includes integrative images embedded in verbal text. For instance, business cards of heroes, words highlighted red in newspaper articles and letters. On the one hand, all these tools are optional: if you remove the drawings and photographs, the plot will not be affected; they only reflect and illustrate the objects that Oscar faces. On the other hand, they are part of the author's artistic idea; they affect a reader's perception and are necessary for the integrity of the work as a whole.

The title complex is another crucial element of the novel. It captures state of the characters and demonstrates the time space of a chapter, for example, `WHY I'M NOT WHERE YOU ARE 5/21/63' - one of those which talks about inner self-knowledge and travellings of Oscar's grandfather. Some of the titles occur throughout the novel several times. The title `MY FEELINGS' is repeated in order to show the development of Oscar's inner condition. We can also trace the tendency of healing through the titles. In the first half of the novel the title `HEAVY BOOTS HEAVIER BOOTS', for example, shows the swing of heavily depressive emotions of the boy. On the contrary, the title `BEAUTIFUL AND TRUE' indicates the denouement of the story, some relief and acceptance.

Summing up the analysis, it is worth saying that Foer's artistic method is unique and extremely expressive. Through chosen devices he tells a story of one family who witnessed the tragedy not ones. The central event of the novel is the terrorist attacks on September, 11, 2001. The author reflects how the traumatic experience influenced life of the main characters putting in the center the feelings of young boy, Oscar Shell, and using the following means. First of all, the idea of healing after psychological trauma is delivered in the form of Bildungsroman with the elements of initiation novel and adventure novel as the existential search is shaped into the travellings throughout New York City. Secondly, Foer chose the particular narrative method implying storytelling from three persons. Every character tells about his or her own feelings, emotions, tragedy, interpreting the events from the life of their family. Each of them has lost the loved ones, and it completely changed their life. The third peculiarity follows the previous one. The novel is full of tragedies and traumas experienced not only after the attacks but during the WWII and the period of immigration. By these means the author challenges the uniqueness of 9/11 showing how those attacks alongside with the other catastrophes of humankind is able to change and ruin the life of ordinary people. Not everyone has forces to overcome such disaster which had befallen the little boy, and it is hard to imagine how a person can change after it. Finally, the bright feature of the novel is its paralinguistic means which aim at emotional response and call for personal reflection. They are not simple illustrations to attract and entertain, they immerse into the sensation of reality, especially giving the fact that at least one picture is a shot of a real man falling from the tower. After that we cannot resist the empathy and compassion.

We suppose that as well as the majority of novels about great catastrophes, on the background of the story of one family this novel raises the problem of the society and the generation as a whole. It highlights the importance of psychological and moral support, especially on the governmental level. However, in the reality we observe the manipulations of people's fear. An infant fear of skyscrapers, elevators and stairs, of underground and indoors; then the fear of immigrants, which transfers into prejudice and opposition. After the event the media produced lots of telecasts, shows and videos discussing the reasons and searching for the guilty. There were very few aimed at support and help. Of course, we are not able to prevent many things but what remains to an ordinary person who is doomed to get through them alone? Perhaps, only to come to the most evident conclusion which Foer transmits through the words of his protagonist:

`Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.' Ibid, p. 245.

3. D. Delillo: Effects of the Shock Wave

Don Delillo managed to capture one of the most tragic moments in the history of America, as well as to trace the impact of the events of September, 11 on the lives of specific people, ordinary citizens who will never be the same.

The key characters of the story are two pairs: Keith Neudecker and Lianne Glenn, Nina (Lianne's mother) and Martin. The terrorist attack radically changes the lives of these people. Keith and Lianne, despite the fact that they are divorced, get closer and start living together again, while Nina and Martin, on the contrary, are becoming more and more distant, finally ceasing to understand each other.

Keith survived the attack and went through the hell of the towers. After seeing the deaths of hundreds of people, covered in dust and lime, having lost most of his colleagues and friends, being in a state of shock, he goes through the devastated Manhattan not to his bachelor's apartment, but to his ex-wife Lianne, looking for protection and support. At first it seems that their relationships are gradually improving, but they are not. In the day of the accident, Neudecker returns home with a briefcase of an unknown person, which later leads him into the house of Florence Givens. The brief affair between them happened not so much because of the desire for intimacy, but because of the need to share a traumatic experience. They both witnessed the attacks from the inside of the tower and now remember every detail over and over again as if wanting to understand its meaning and significance.

`They took erotic pleasure from each other but this is not what sent him back there. It was what they knew together, in the timeless drift of the long spiral down, and he went back again even if these meetings contradicted what he'd lately taken to be the truth of his life…' DeLillo, D. (2007a). Falling man. Simon and Schuster, p. 137.

After receiving a severe psychological trauma, Keith digs deeper into himself, becomes bitter and pulls away from his wife and son in the end. He earns a living by taking part in poker tournaments throughout America, and comes home less often. Poker is the link that connects him to his past life. Poker was something of an outlet for him, a way to feel alive, although realizing that he would never be the same again. Perhaps, poker is the only thing that has survived in his soul from that life before the terrorist attacks.

`The money mattered but not so much. The game mattered, the touch of felt beneath the hands, the way the dealer burnt one card, dealt the next… He was playing for the chips. The value of each chip had only hazy meaning. It was the disk itself that mattered, the color itself. There was the laughing man at the far end of the room. There was the fact that they would all be dead one day… The game mattered, the stacking of chips, the eye count, the play and dance of hand and eye. He was identical with these things.' Ibid, p. 228.