ABSTRACT
In a widely noted essay from 2009, Richard Gray diagnoses 9/11 literature with a double failure of the imagination. Gray notes that while canonical 9/11 fictions such as Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, and Jay McInerney’s The Good Life duly acknowledge that after 9/11 “some kind of alteration of imaginative structures is required,” they lack “the ability and the willingness imaginatively to act on that recognition” (2009: 134). The first problem is that their assessment of the psychosocial effects of the ashes of 9/11 rarely moves beyond “the preliminary stages of trauma” (2009: 130); the second is that these ashes are invariably gathered into the domestic domain: time and again, Gray writes, 9/11 fiction “retreat[s] into domestic detail” (2009: 134). The upshot of this preoccupation with domestic trauma is a foreclosure of the global dimensions of the affective and political changes that the events of 9/11 have unleashed. Against this tormented homeliness, Gray recommends a literature that is more willing to “open up and hybridize American culture” (2009: 153). In his response to Gray, published in the same issue of American Literary History, Michael Rothberg finds himself in broad agreement with Gray’s assessment and recommendation, and adds that Gray’s call for a hybridized America could be enriched by “a complementary centrifugal mapping that charts the outward movement of American power” (2009: 153). What is needed, according to Gray and Rothberg, is less domesticity and more world; what prevents a passage from the former to the latter is a tendency to linger over the disabling psychological effects of trauma.
