Category: Don DeLillo

The 9/11 Novel Now

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Colum McCann, Dave Eggers, Don DeLillo

The Panorama Book Review, part of Dave Eggers‘ effort to show what can be improved in the newspaper in general and the book review in particular*, includes an essay by Juliet Litman considering the evolution of the 9/11 novel. To perhaps overly reduce her thesis, novels like Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Don DeLillo‘s Falling Man used the image of a man falling from one of the Twin Towers to evoke the pain of the day’s events—they are “artifacts of the aftershock.” By contrast, novels like Colum McCann‘s Let the Great World Spin, which uses Philippe Petit’s 1974 wirewalk between the tops of the Twin Towers as a thematic device, and Joseph O’Neill‘s Netherland, suggest how much we’ve healed in the past few years. Litman writes:

Like Falling Man, [Let the Great World Spin] forces its readers to relive and rewatch the fall over and over again—but here, the man does not fall. With each vignette, we meet someone who is somehow wounded, a character who is destined for or has already experienced an untimely descent, and we feel their disquiet as they ponder the tightrope walker. Their falls have occurred all over New York, not necessarily at the site of the Twin Towers, and so much grief suffuses the story that reader can can hardly revel in Petit’s achievement. Thus, in one swift narrative, readers experience both the sadness of those already wounded and the safety of certain survival.

Positioning McCann’s book as a 9/11 novel requires a little fancy footwork; with the exception of the epilogue, all the action takes place well before the terrorist attacks. Of course, McCann knew what he was doing in writing a story that prominently featured the World Trade Center in this day and age—his passages on Petit’s walk focus on feelings of fear and helpless spectatorship among the folks on the ground. And Litman’s on to something: If the novel says something about the post-9/11 mood, it may be more about an eagerness to get past it—McCann overstuffs the narrative with character after character as if to reclaim New York as a place full of life. Netherland has a similar strategy—to focus on the living instead of the dead, and even to avoid the trauma of the day head-on. (For all its cricket chatter, the book could be considered a sports novel as easily as a 9/11 one.)

“The synecdochic falling man—the symbol for the larger, brutal aftershocks of the attacks—has given way to McCann’s metonymic, never-falling tightrope walker and to the open-to-everything eye of O’Neill,” Litman writes. In some ways that marks a reversal of critical expectations from the 9/11 novel—not so long ago Keith Gessen told NPR that he thought it would be 50 years before 9/11 was the subject of a great novel. Great or not, it may be that the project of writing novels about that day is wrapping up—moving from shock to healing in less than a decade.

* In that regard, it’s hit-and-miss. I like the idea of including original fiction in a book review, and George Saunders‘ “Fox 8” is clever. The reviews themselves introduce two good ideas: a replication of the first page of the book under consideration, which gives you a sense of the writing as well as the look of the words of the page (that’s not entirely unimportant), and a sidebar listing data about the book’s author, which keeps the boilerplate biographical stuff from clotting the review proper. A feature on male cover models for romance novels seems in concept a nice way to integrate reported stories (haven’t read it); charticles on bookstore economics and commonly mispronounced author names have good information and can be processed quickly. But if the book review of the future has to include things like James Franco and Miranda July talking at each other about the pleasures and frustrations of being actors and writers at the same time, count me out. I happily let my subscription to Interview lapse a while back; at $18 for 12 issues, it counted among the dumbest things I’ve spent money on.

DeLillo in Winter

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Richard Rayner uses a new edition of Don DeLillo‘s White Noise as an opportunity to remind us of the author’s charms:

“White Noise” posits a world, very much our world, in which TV images and a sense of déjà vu replace real events even as they’re happening. “I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters,” Gladney says, a haunting and lovely phrase that, for a few seconds, reclaims his being from anxiety and media saturation.

“White Noise” is almost overstuffed with such moments, with deadpan dialogue and scintillating aphorisms. DeLillo’s biggest kick comes not from satire, or the evocation of the mystery and magic that course through our lives, but from making language pop and fizz.

Pop and fizz—remember when DeLillo made language do that? His concerns have become more interior and less world-encompassing in the three novels he’s published since 1997’s Underworld. Perhaps by necessity, his prose has become similarly less expansive. Few readers ever went to him strictly for laughs, but the satire and taste for irony that Rayner admires is all but absent now. I have a galley of DeLillo’s next novel, Point Omega, and though I have my hopes I also dread what’s coming; at less than 150 pages it looks light as a pamphlet but seems heavy as a concrete piling.

Of course, DeLillo’s reputation would be much smaller if he kept repeating the dryly arch tone of White Noise. The question is whether his increasing grimness has gotten him anywhere. In his book Out of the Blue, critic Kristiaan Versluys argued that 2007’s Falling Man evoked the way 9/11 fractured our capacity to tell stories in conventional forms—so the thinly drawn characters and the paragraphs soaked in vague foreboding are strategic responses to the death of comforting narratives, not failures on DeLillo’s part. I’m willing to revisit the book at some point to test the argument for myself, but I worry if it will just again feel, as I suspect, much like “Midnight in Dostoevsky,” a DeLillo short story that ran in the New Yorker last November.

The setting is again a college, but now it’s Jack Gladney’s stomping grounds in nuclear winter: The weather is gray and windy, the two characters are grimly academic college boys, and their shared class is in logic, taught by a man prone to pronouncements like, “The only laws that matter are laws of thought. The rest is devil worship.” In a certain light, the story is a mildly comic existential tale: The two young men ponder the background of the old man who wanders the campus, filling him up with more drama than he probably deserves, confident in their imaginations but too timid to actually approach the man and figure out what his deal is.

All of which is fine as far as it goes, though DeLillo never quite nails down how callow he’d like his narrator and his friend to be. On winter break he wanders the town (even more a ghost town that it’s felt like before):

On the stunted commercial street in town, there were three places still open for business, one of them the diner, and I ate there once and stuck my head in the door two or three times, scanning the booths. The sidewalk was old, pocked bluestone. In the convenience store, I bought a fudge bar and talked to the woman behind the counter about her son’s wife’s kidney infection.

Nothing in the story suggests that he’s had much capacity, let alone interest, in such casual conversation about such a serious issue. Perhaps he and the clerk have known each other a while; perhaps she volunteered the information without his encouragement. But a more assured DeLillo would’ve clarified the matter, or dispensed with the bit entirely; in any event, that’s just a minor plot hiccup compared to the ginned-up conflict between the boys that concludes the story. By the end things have moved pretty much nowhere, from a dimly felt fear of connection to a dimly felt fear of connection. It’s fine if DeLillo chooses to abandon the tone he pioneered in White Noise. What’s disappointing is the loss of sure-footedness that’s come with it.

Q&A: Dr. Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Academia, Art Spiegelman, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer

Dr. Kristiaan Versluys, a professor of English at the University of Ghent, takes a close look at a handful of 9/11-themed works of fiction in his new book, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. Perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that it prompted me to rethink my reactions to the novels he discusses—I may never be a great admirer of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, but the book reveals how carefully DeLillo worked to mimic the ways that traumatic events unsettle our ability to tell stories. Dr. Versluys does much the same for the other books he covers in-depth, including Art Spiegelman‘s graphic memoir In the Shadow of No Towers, Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Frédéric Beigbeder‘s Windows on the World. Out of the Blue is an academic book, but it’s low on jargon, and provides some useful context for the debates about 9/11 fiction that are bound to emerge in the future.

Dr. Versluys answered questions about Out of the Blue via e-mail.

Much of Out of the Blue discusses 9/11 fiction in relation to trauma studies. Did you have an interest in the relationship between trauma and literature before writing the essays in this book? What led you to look at trauma as one of the main prisms you use to study this literature—as opposed to, say, through the prism of politics?

When I spent a sabbatical year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in 2004-5, the idea was to write a book on recent New York fiction. I have taught many courses on that topic both at Ghent University, my home university in Belgium, and as a guest professor in the Columbia summer school program. The way I had planned it, the last chapter would be devoted to 9/11 fiction. For reasons too intricate to explain I started with the last chapter, only to realize that in the short time since the terrorist attacks had taken place, a body of work had come out that was substantial enough to be the subject of a separate book.

The first text I studied in depth was Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. Spiegelman looks upon the events of September 11 through the conceptual screen of the Holocaust. That led me to take a closer look at trauma studies in general and Holocaust-studies in particular. I have always treated post-structuralist approaches to literature with a great deal of skepticism. But especially the writings of Dominick LaCapra (rather than the canonical Cathy Caruth) made me aware of the fact that in trauma studies post-structuralism – so often abstract and theoretical in its orientation – touches ground and provides a tool to talk with respect and deference about things that remain essentially unsayable. Nonetheless, I feel that, at bottom, I remain an old-fashioned humanist. I prefer to read novels in the grain, rather than against the grain. And while I am indebted to post-structuralism for its attention to language and though I take into account that language introduces fissures and ruptures, I also perceive it to be an instrument of healing and restoration.

You write that the 9/11-themed works you discuss “testify to the shattering of certainties and the laborious recovery of balance.” I imagine that novelists writing on subjects such as war, or totalitarianism, or even domestic abuse, might feel they’re doing the same kind of testifying. What, if anything, distinguishes 9/11 novels from fiction about those other kinds of traumatic experiences?

As a traumatic event, September 11 is comparable to other traumatic events. Paradoxically, though, one of the characteristics it shares with similar events, is that it is singular and irreducible. In the first place this is the case, of course, for the victims, their families and friends. No analogy is capable of capturing what it means to be trapped in a burning tower or to lose one’s parent, spouse or close friend.

In addition, 9/11 is arguably the first instance of what one could call global trauma. It was witnessed not only by the people in the direct vicinity of the WTC-towers on that bright Tuesday morning. It was also witnessed by millions and presumably hundreds of millions on TV, either live or in the many repetitions of the iconic images that everybody remembers. It is possible that in order to talk about this new kind of trauma, we will need a new vocabulary, a new or at least a modified conceptual framework. We know a lot already about indirect witnessing and secondary trauma, esp. with regard to second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors. We also know that a whole culture can undergo a sense of shock so severe that its collective assumptions are profoundly disrupted and that a catastophe can “create ‘problems of identity’ for individuals and communities well beyond its circumference of material destruction” (Gray and Oliver). So there is a lot of theory to go on already. Yet it seems to me we are dealing here with something that is different from what preceded. Notions such as those of authenticy or inauthenticity, the traumatic sublime, postmemory, trauma transference, empty empathy etc. – all notions that are current in trauma theory – may have to be adapted or revised to fit the new category of global trauma. Televised indirect experience raises new questions as to what is genuine and what is hype and it establishes new conditions for making memorializing into an act of approximation and not an act of appropriation.

You note that there are about 30 literary novels available currently about 9/11. Were there other 9/11 books that you considered writing about at length? I suspect you’ve already heard from people wondering why the book doesn’t mention, say, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland or Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country.

In order to keep the study manageable, I made the decision early on to deal only with novels in which 9/11 is not just a background event, but in which it plays an essential role in the plot development. Apart from the two novels you mention, there are more novels of merit in which 9/11 is part of the background: Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, to mention only a few. I deal with two such novels (Anita Shreve’s A Wedding in December and Ian McEwan’s Saturday) in the epilogue to indicate that, as time goes by and the first shock wears off, 9/11 is bound to become “spectralized.” Its presence will become less and less visible, but for that reason all the more haunting. The direct treatment of the events on September 11 is bound to be replaced in the collective imagination by the indirect treatment. To study that phenomenon requires another book.

Your chapter on Falling Man ends with a provocative statement: Because the novel “allows for no proper mourning or working through,” you write, there’s a danger that “it can serve as a prelude to, or be used as an excuse for, wholesale, reactionary and even totalitarian movements of redress and moral restoration.” Can you elaborate on how these movements might manifest themselves?

I borrow this idea from Dominick LaCapra. The point he makes is that a condition of collective grief that is considered irredeemable might be the breeding ground for a revanchist logic. If the nation does not learn to deal with loss, it might be tempted to restore normalcy “through the elimination or victimization of those to whom blame is imputed” (LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 65). This line of reasoning is related to the distinction between true and false witnessing, made by the psycho-analysist R.J. Lifton. False witnessing, according to Lifton, occurs when death anxiety is converted directly into killing. The example he cites is the massacre at My Lai. But it could easily be applied to the way the Bush administration reacted to September 11 and in fact to the ultra-conservative backlash that lasted till the election of President Obama. The novels I discuss argue for an ethics of responsibility, in which the complexity of the situation is fully presented and the simple binary logic of “us versus them” – so cleverly exploited by the Bush administration – is avoided.

Critics have been largely (though not uniformly) unkind to the books you discuss, and you elaborate on some of the reasons why. Writing about Falling Man, you note that “the characters are so thin that their whole existence boils down to mere nomenclature” and that “no narrative momentum is allowed to develop.” You note the “flatness” of Grandpa’s character in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and the “soppy happy ending” of Terrorist. But you also point out many rewarding characteristics of these novels that you believe critics missed. Do you feel the negative critical reaction to these books is related more to their unconventional structures and approaches, or more to the way they are, as you write, “subversive of nationalistic imperatives”?

Let’s be clear about one point: the great September 11 novel has not been written yet and maybe it never will. To a point, the negative critical reactions are justified and understandable. No writer has yet been able to capture the magnitude of the event or the shock it produced. The unsayable remains unsaid. The negative critical reactions might, therefore, be understood as the result of disappointment. Here is an event that cries out for a definitive reading and it is not forthcoming. Nonetheless, there is much more to these books than some reviewers have spotted. My study is a tribute to the few writers who have been courageous enough to tackle an impossible topic. Even though they succeeded only partially, there is much insight to be gained from their efforts.

You note that nearly all the books under discussion have been written by white American men, and write that it’s an open question whether future 9/11 fiction will be “marked by more gender and ethic diversity or acquire a more outspoken international dimension.” What do think has made 9/11 the province of such a singular kind of writer thus far?

The answer to this question can only be pure guess work. Minority writers might have no need to deal with 9/11, as long as they are dealing with the traumas in their collective pasts. As to women, Anita Shreve and Claire Messud have been prominent in recording the dispersion of 9/11 in the culture at large as a spectral presence, a vestige, palpable but invisible.

Links: First Family

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Jack Pendarvis, John Pipkin, John Steinbeck, Leonard Gardner, Mark Twain, Patrick Somerville, Paul Harding, Philipp Meyer, Upton Sinclair, Yiyun Li

The Center for Fiction has announced the finalists for its first novel prize: Philipp Meyer‘s American Rust, Patrick Somerville‘s The Cradle, Paul Harding‘s Tinkers, Yiyun Li‘s The Vagrants, and John Pipkin‘s Woodsburner. I can strongly endorse both The Vagrants and American Rust—more on the latter soon.

Daniel Menaker catalogs the various agonies of working in the publishing business today. “When you are trying to acquire books that hundreds of thousands of people will buy, read, and like, you have to have some of the eclectic and demotic taste of the reading public,” he writes, which rankles Michael Orthofer: “Why not give literary discernment a try?” he asks. I suspect the books reflecting literary discernment don’t get financed without the largesse that’s facilitated only when you luck out at making books that hundreds of thousands of people will buy, read, and like.

Case in point: MacAdam/Cage, a small press that prides itself on publishing fiction of literary discernment, is having financial troubles. Unfortunately, this means a delay for Jack Pendarvis’ upcoming novel, Shut Up, Ugly, but he’s taking it in stride.

On October 13 in New York, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and others will participate in a reading of documents relating to the torture of detainees.

In related DeLillo news, the new cover for the paperback edition of White Noise is both very attractive and uncannily appropriate—something about illustrator Michael Cho’s style slyly echoes the satirical, pop-culture-soaked tone of the novel.

Leonard Gardner recalls his work on Fat City, both the book and the film. Regarding the fact that he never wrote a second novel, he has a stock answer: “Sometimes you only get to win one championship.”

A reminder that John Steinbeck‘s The Grapes of Wrath wasn’t admired in all quarters when it was first published.

In 1908 when burglars broke into Mark Twain‘s home in Redding, Connecticut. Twain would quip shortly after the incident: “Now they (the burglars) are in jail, and if they keep on, they will go to Congress. When a person starts down hill, you can never tell where he is going to stop.”

And American Agriculturist would like to call bullshit on people who compare the works of Michael Pollan et al to Upton Sinclair‘s The Jungle.

Links: Pocket Symphony

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, James Ellroy, Mark Twain, Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury

James Ellroy has very strong opinions about classical music: “‘I dig late Mozart,'” he says. ‘There’s a hair of dissonance, there’s more vavoom, the late symphonies. I got Böhm, the Berlin Philharmonic. I love the 21st Piano Concerto – “Elvira Madigan” – Sinfonia Concertante, the Clarinet Concerto. But that’s it. Haydn you can have, Handel you can have, Baroque I can’t listen to.'”

Matthew Yglesias is still catching hell for liking Moby-Dick. A Mother Jones blogger retorts: “I didn’t care for it. I’ll spare you the details since I’d just be opening myself up to quite justified charges of philistinism, and who needs that?” Yglesias did make an error in saying that you can’t understand America without it; the only book for which that’s true is the Bible, and then just the angry parts.

“Mailer felt obliged to make literature, or better yet a demonic theoretical broadside, out of his hump-piles and pungent smoke.”

Montana: America’s new home for werewolf fantasy novels.

The Ransom Center has a host of online materials relating to Edgar Allan Poe, in relation to the exhibit that opens there next week.

Eudora Welty‘s One Writer’s Beginnings helped keep Mary Chapin Carpenter from becoming miserable when she was starting to play her songs at D.C. clubs.

Production of the film version of Don DeLillo‘s End Zone is on hold.

The Chicago Tribune‘s Julia Keller, who once worried in public whether a graphic-novel adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report represented “an advance or retreat for civilization” (no, really), is now sweating a graphic-novel adaptation to Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451: “I find myself wishing graphic novels weren’t so hip; their popularity has made me question my own motives. Am I just trying to sound cool? Is an affection for graphic novels by anyone over 25 simply the literary equivalent of buying a sports car or getting a face-lift?”

There’s a seminar on September 15 on whether Mark Twain would use Twitter. For some reason, Michael Buckley will be a part of this; frankly, I’d be more interested in reading a long essay by Twain about “What the Buck?”

It’s Labor Day weekend, so I likely won’t be around here until after the holiday. In the meantime, you can read the story about Studs Terkel, Labor Day, the yuppie couple, and the bus stop in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood—over and over again.

Links: Dirty Old Men

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, George Pelecanos, Jim Harrison, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, Ward Just

Playboy will publish an excerpt of Vladimir Nabokov‘s final work, an unfinished novella titled The Original of Laura. Don’t look so shocked: The magazine interviewed him in 1964.

Ernest Hemingway: KGB spy?

The Second Pass takes a look at ten books that need to be tossed out of the canon. First up, Don DeLillo‘s White Noise: “DeLillo sacrifices any sense of realism for dull, thin polemic.” I’m not buying the “polemic” bit, and who said he was shooting for realism anyhow?

The Iowa Review has a new editor.

Politico rings up Ward Just for a quote about the death of Robert McNamara.

Eudora Welty‘s estate pulled her name out of the running for the renaming of her alma mater, the Mississippi University for Women.

The Atlantic has a modest proposal: Give tax breaks to publishers who support new and little-known writers. M.A. Orthofer retorts, “don’t ‘not-for-profit’ publishers (many of the finest small publishers in the US) already get obscene tax breaks ?”

John Updike‘s longtime home in Beverly Farms, Mass., sold last month for $2.5 million.

Jim Harrison has a pretty fancy house too, though his actual writing room looks like a cubicle in an abandoned real-estate brokerage.

George Pelecanos doesn’t know jack about writing about shotguns, according to a Field & Stream gunblogger: “Pelecanos in particular will put characters in a tense armed standoff, then have someone say ‘I can shoot you before you have time to rack that pump.’ In real life the immediate reply would be ‘Boom.'”

Links: Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Sedaris, Don DeLillo, Ernest Hemingway, Ha Jin, Jim Thompson, John Updike, Russell Banks, Toni Morrison

John Callaway, longtime host of Chicago Tonight, the news program of the city’s PBS station, died this week. Among the videos on the tribute page is an interview with John Updike, circa Terrorist.

Jim Thompson discusses his path of going from bartending in Finland to publishing his new novel, Snow Angels

Austin-based hip-hop producer David Williams makes a valid point: “You know what’s a shame about calling your band The Airborne Toxic Event? If that band’s fans haven’t read Don DeLillo, they’re just gonna think, ‘Fart.'” Discussions of Saul Bellow and Walter Benjamin ensue.

On a related note, DeLillo’s next novel comes out next year.

Ha Jin discusses writing in English as his second language.

There’s something charming about the fact that one of the people leading the charge to preserve Ernest Hemingway‘s home in Cuba is Bob Vila.

A group of Ohio University students have made a film version of Russell Banks‘ 1981 collection of interlinked stories, Trailerpark.

Parents in Litchfield, New Hampshire, are outraged that stories by Stephen King, Laura Lippman, David Sedaris, and Ernest Hemingway are being taught in high school. The story ends with a hell of a kicker: “The parents objected to satirist Sedaris’ ‘I Like Guys’ because they do not want their children learning about homosexuality in school.”

Oh, and a couple of school-board members are still blowing a gasket over Song of Solomon in Shelby, Michigan.

Teaching and Learning the 9/11 Novel

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Academia, Art Spiegelman, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Joseph O'Neill, Ken Kalfus

James Mulholland, an assistant professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, recently finished teaching a class called “Literature and Culture After 9/11.” Many of the books he taught were some of the best-known works of fiction addressing the attacks. On the list of required texts:

Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation
Don DeLillo, Falling Man
Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets
Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
Joseph O’Neill, Netherland
Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration

Music was also a part of the mix, including Bruce Springsteen‘s The Rising and John Adams‘ On the Transmigration of Souls, as well as documentaries, news stories, essays, magazine pieces, memorial Web sites, and more. The full list of materials on the syllabus alone is a retort to the idea that we don’t yet have enough material to start talking about a “9/11 literature.”

After reading the syllabus, I sent a handful of questions about the course to Mulholland. He not only answered them, he presented them to his class and made them a part of the discussion. (“I think they were intrigued by the idea of an outside audience for what we were doing in class,” Mulholland wrote me.) Below are my questions, along with responses, sent via e-mail, from both him and his students.

I imagine that many of the students in your course were barely teenagers on Sept. 11, 2001. How engaged are they with the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,” if it’s always been part of their cultural consciousness?

Mulholland:

They were barely teenagers; most of them were in middle school during the attacks. This is what surprised me most when I began teaching the course. On the first day of class, I asked them each to compose a single-paged response that described to me where they were on September 11th, 2001. I thought of this exercise as a way for them to position themselves in the course from the outset. I also rather smugly thought of it as a way to get through what I perceived as their inevitable desire to emote about the events of 9/11. Two things surprised me. First, their stories were all extremely similar. Nearly every student (out of 35) reported that they were in school, saw the worried look on teachers faces and heard them mumbling to each other. Many claimed they saw the attacks reported on television after teachers wheeled televisions into class. Many said they were not truly worried until they saw the faces of their parents when they came to pick them up. I was unprepared for how uniform their experiences had been, since I fully expected it to be like my friends who had a variety of close and proximate encounters with 9/11 and a variety of emotionally complex responses. (I was a graduate student at Rutgers University in NJ in 2001 and had a number of friends who lived in NY.)

The second and perhaps most surprising element of their personal experiences was how articulate they could be about them. Claims of this generation as the most narcissistic, which often circulate through academia, seemed completely eradicated by the poise and intelligence of their emotional responses. Some of this I think you see in their responses. In particular, I had a number of students from NY (two of whom were in school near WTC) and others who had friends or family friends affected by the event. Questions about the proximity to the event, who has ownership of it, who is affected most became some of the most contentious, difficult, and rewarding—they told me—discussions of the entire class. They showed an enormous personal sophistication about their place, and their generation’s role, in defining the memory of 9/11. I offered to them the idea that they were the inheritors of 9/11 memories and they took that up.

Students:

It is not the event that changed everything, but people who changed everything. We have made things symbolic that might not have been otherwise.

Even if I hadn’t taken this class, I would still feel this: September 11th increased a national sense of paranoia. With the shift in presidents, that paranoia is put at ease, as though Bush’s strong association with the event (as president at the time) affects the way we feel about 9/11 itself. The change in office allows for a new space for thinking ahead, to the future, instead of back to a point when political figures became a representation of larger national concerns and fears.

Instead, now we are relying on this literature [of 9/11] to shape how we feel about the event. We were at the “coming of age” period of our lives. We were absorbing information, but without the means to make our own opinions about it. We had little sense of what we thought about it, except for what people told us.

Some of us were thinking about how it affected us, but others were wondering about it’s affect on the larger populace. Many of us were concerned for ourselves, for our own confusion, and how uncomfortable 9/11 made us feel. We were not concerned with 9/11 “changing everything,” except for how it changed our own surroundings.

Nonetheless, many things did change, but those changes didn’t necessarily affect us. Some of us were profoundly affected by these events. Others felt like there was a continuation of American habits after 9/11 that made no distinction about before and after the event. It’s obviously different for everyone.

The memory of 9/11 will affect us more than anything else, but we are the last of that generation. People younger than us probably will get more out of information and representations than experiencing the actual event itself.

The generations “after us” will not have a memory of the event, so how are they even going to know if 9/11 changed anything or not? They’ll have no reference point, no experience from direct memory. (Yet the event seems so prevalent in art and culture that we seem to be “holding onto” the event, without judgment of how we do so.) Why are we associating this event with enormous changes in symbolic and cultural change? This is one of the questions we’re trying to address in this class. There is always going to be some amount of change, and yet 9/11 has seemed to be a moment of enormous change and this class in part acknowledges and investigates that. 9/11 is a significant change but not the only one.

Ultimately, however, we are concerned that we are being grouped together, which makes personal meaning difficult to create and removes the possibility of specific judgments. We are very conscious now that we cannot generalize; we are reluctant to speak for our age group about responding to 9/11.

The graphic-novel adaptation of 9/11 attracted criticism from some for diminishing the importance of the event. Have your students responded to that book (and Spiegelman’s “No Towers”) in a way that’s any different from the novels you’ve included?

Mulholland:

They responded remarkably differently. Our discussion of the graphic adaptation focused a great deal on what the formal and generic transformation meant for the information in the report. They were extremely suspicious of the idea that the adaptation was meant to make the Commission’s findings more accessible. (This surprised me since it was a gesture that I thought would meet with their acclaim.) They also were uncertain about the graphic quality of the drawing in the Commission Report adaptation. Many felt like it was exploitative and utilized too many of the features of action cartoons. Others argued that visual drawings, rather than printed text, put us in the position to imagine that which we did not want to imagine—to visualize the final moments on the plane for example.

For Speigelman, they struggled less with the politics (another surprise) than the formal complexity of the work. The layering of panels and the multiple time periods of In the Shadow of No Towers made discussing this work slow and laborious. Spiegelman so expertly draws the chaotic paranoia of 9/11 and I believe they experienced it again.

Both of these responses lead me to think that they were more comfortable with the novel as a genre, which means that novels of 9/11 were correspondingly more understandable to them. Nonetheless, elements of the novels we read for class troubled all of the students.

Students:

There was, we think, a conflict between the intent and the perception. In general, we tend to be skeptical of the translation and of the spirit to use the visual form to popularize the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report.

Our discussion of the novel allows for a satirical effect that creates a rare emotional space. One of the distinguishing features of the graphic narratives is that they make few attempts at photorealism and so viewers need to work a bit harder to place themselves into the experience of seeing the graphic narrative. In this way it is similar to reading printed text, but through a different lens.

This different experience is difficult to determine. What about the graphic diminishes the experience of the event? Is it that it slips into memory, that it is being forgotten? What seems so uncomfortable about the graphic novel is that doesn’t fit a clear genre, so that it diminishes the experience of 9/11 only to the degree that a viewer lets it be diminished. Some of us feel like the use of comics makes the event seem cartoonish and fictional, which feels distressing. Comics were supposed to be an escape. Others, however, felt like visual modes were used to describe historical events all the time and so they felt that the use of comics didn’t change the experience by trivializing it. Others felt like 9/11 was an enormously visual event, and so assimilating it to the techniques of the graphic novel made it feel too similar.

The novels you included employ very diverse styles and tones—Kalfus is irreverent, DeLillo is coldly philosophical about the event while O’Neill is more warmly so. In teaching these novels, are you looking for commonalities between the books or discussing the different perspectives they have on the event?

Mulholland:

As I mentioned above, there were elements of each novel that troubled my students. Some were surprising, others were not. Kalfus’s irreverence charmed them, but there were limits, such as the public sex scene at the end. I could not get them to come to solid conclusion/positions about what technique was being employed there. Foer’s characterization of Oskar Schell engaged and repelled students equally, though the end of the work was utterly heart-breaking, as Foer no doubt intended, for nearly everyone in the class. Oskar became a very personal character, and my students responded to him as if he was a living human being. My students readily adapted to the experimental form of Foer’s work, and dwelled less on it than on Oskar (again, a surprise to me). Netherland enthralled them, and we had a phone interview in class with O’Neill (one of my students happened to know him) that only intensified that reaction.

Throughout my teaching I was looking for thematic and formal continuities between the works. The one work that I personally disliked, DeLillo’s Falling Man, was a work that they made new for me. They made me find a number of interesting formal angles—such as the representation of dialogue—that had utterly eluded me. Our attention to different formal experiments in each novel was paralled by a discussion of feeling—of each novels attempts to engage with the emotions, affect, and sentimentality of its various characters in response to 9/11. I wanted them to be able to trace the ways that novelists offered formally different solutions to the same fundamental artistic problems: how do we represent 9/11 in literature? What is the meaning of the varied emotional reactions to 9/11?

Students:

One element that we consistently noticed during the class was the emphasis on relationships that were broken through terror. There is a strong connection between the private life and public events in these novels.

The novel as a form lends itself to multiple perspectives. Each novel seems to show a negative side of the aftermath of 9/11; the difficulties of people coping with the trauma and how that trauma affects others around them. Often there are children involved, so that each novel seems fascinated by the effect of 9/11 on kids. The games that these children are described to play become symbolic and highly disturbing. The novels themselves seem intent on imitating the events of 9/11.

All of these novels are structurally all over the place. There is a large amount of formal experimentation and they all have this in common. (“Mustache. No Mustache. Mustache.”) They also show that there is not a single response to 9/11. Each has a different sense of how 9/11 impacts culture. Novels are one place where you can experiment, more so than in poetry. They also show that life carried on after 9/11, that it didn’t change everything.

What inspired you to teach this course? When did you feel like there were enough works out there to start teaching “9/11 literature”?

Mulholland:

I think two things inspired me to teach this course. The first was the first time I read the 9/11 Commission Report. I can’t recall when this was—it was not immediately—but when I did I noticed that the opening paragraph reads like a novel. Since I study the origins of the English novel in my academic work, I found the Report’s harnessing of novelistic fictional techniques fascinating. It was trying to tell a story in a way that was familiar to its audience.

From here I had the idea of tracing the intersections of literature and 9/11. I started collecting materials, and soon after listened to a radio show called the “Rise of 9/11 Literature” on NPR. On this show, Keith Gessen, of n+1 fame, claimed that he thought it would be fifty years before there would be a great novel of 9/11. It was an axiom that everyone on the panel seemed to agree with; novelists, it seems, need time to sort through and assimilate the experience.

Which made me wonder why. Since I teach literature as a precise register of historical change, I wondered who had already written about 9/11. Who was writing now? What was their literature like? Was it inauthentic because it was an almost immediate response?

I knew of some of these writers already, say Jay McInerney, and the danger of using 9/11 as a sad addition to one’s book. It seemed to have brought nothing but spite from critics. Nonetheless, I thought I would collect everything I could.

But what ultimately motivated me to propose this class was the utter lack of other classes. When I began to search for syllabi of English classes on 9/11 literature, I found nothing. Not a single class. There were classes in history, sociology, political science. But not one English class. It seemed impossible to me that I couldn’t find anything, and the simple absence propelled me to create the course.

What have your students responded to most strongly? What provokes disagreement and debate?

Mulholland:

As I mentioned in question 1, some of the most difficult moments occurred when students decided to take possession of the experience by testifying to their proximity to the event. This is still ultimately inpenetrable in terms of its authenticity; to have been in NY or directly affected by 9/11 gives a credibility that exceeds any other that I can think of in the United States today.

These debates did not happen very often, no doubt because my students were very sophisticated in the ways they discuss the personal effect of 9/11. I would argue now that this results from the fact they have lived this condition for nearly their entire adult lives.

There were localized moments when there were contentious discussions about specific pieces of literature, or theories (David Simpson’s 9/11: Culture of Commemoration divided the class, before ultimately uniting them in an attempt to develop of own theory of what commemorating 9/11 might mean.) But the politics of 9/11 was a point of consistent, if subdued, tension. I had a number of students who were politically radical. I had a number of students who deeply held strong feelings of American patriotism. I tried to make the class about art and literature rather than history and politics, knowing full well that these four categories always intersect. But there were evident moments when the class became quiet over a forceful political opinion—most often about the Bush administration and the aftermath of 9/11. (This became most apparent when a student did a class presentation on conspiracy theories about the “real” actors behind 9/11.) Interestingly, these discussions never became argumentative; I think that the weight and significance of discussing 9/11 always motivated my students to be responsible, think the best of other people, and look for points of contact while civilly disagreeing. I did not expect this when I began the class, fully imagining how I would negotiate the contentious politics and emotional exhaustion that came from discussing 9/11 for thirteen straight weeks. This moment never came; I happily can say that the students were sad when the classes ended because the material interested them. Rather than exhausted they were energized by the material.

Students:

The notion of aesthetics comes up a great deal, along with the tension between artistic aesthetics and sentimentality.

There have repeatedly been issues of ownership: do we own this topic now? Does expertise or experience matter for ownership of this class? We have managed to put this material in the realm of theory, to conceptualize it, so now we have managed to get past this tension? Or do we switch from the sense that 9/11 is too violent to discuss to another way of avoiding responsibility by conceptualizing it.

As the class has progressed we have developed different media have taken us away from the visceral response to more conceptual questions.

The syllabus itself feels like a narrative. We begin with personal stories and then return to cultural and emotional materials. We have wondered throughout if 9/11 is an event in our conscious lives—that we feel?—or a historical event that has already been archived. We have been following a trend from how we witness to how we cope. We begin to collect a sense of what the terrain is.

We wondered as well if the art we study in this class is an act of documenting history or exploiting it. Is it dehumanizing 9/11 to talk about its art and literature? This becomes most apparent in the graphic moments when we explored the idea of “falling” people or photographs of limbs at Ground Zero.

The discussion of the 9/11 Commission Report and its graphic adaptation was especially emotional and contentious. We asked whether this adaptation was appropriate: did it make the event seem trivial? Was it too violent? What is the reliability of a report that is written like fiction or presented as a cartoon?

We also debated what David Simpson has called the “culture of commemoration.” Who’s to say who the heroes of 9/11 were? Are the victims and firefighters and terrorists heroes? What are the international ramifications and response to 9/11? What is the connection between 9/11 for the rest of the world beyond the United States?

Most of our debates thus far concerned the ability of art to capture the emotions and impact of the event, and the philosophical meaning of trying to do so. How does the culture of 9/11 make us feel?

Links: The Names

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Alica Walker, Don DeLillo, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nelson Algren, Walter Benn Michaels

comomonwealthhonorees20091

Here’s Don DeLillo, winner of the 2009 Common Wealth Award, along with three fellow winners who, unlike him, don’t seem to mind smiling: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kevin Spacey, and Buzz Aldrin.

Growing up bookish in Chicago meant, at least for me, that Nelson Algren was all but unavoidable, but apparently that’s not true in the rest of the country, according to a Los Angeles Times report, which includes comments from DeLillo and Russell Banks. Just wait until everybody gets a load of Stuart Dybek.

The Great Gatsby: the ballet.

Alice Walker‘s papers are now available at Emory University. The university’s Web site includes a slideshow of some of the more interesting holdings, including the invoice of Walker’s purchase of a headstone for Zora Neale Hurston‘s tomb.

Andrew Seal has what I’m hoping will be the last word on the Walter Benn Michaels foofaraw. I’m grateful that somebody’s willing to marshal the intellectual rigor to dismantle Michaels’ bloviations, and get in a few good zingers too. (“To say that Michaels is being absolutist is like saying an elephant is heavyset.”) Seal also points to video of the New York Public Library event that inspired all the chatter.

Literary agent Eric Simonoff, whose roster includes Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many other heavy hitters, discusses his recent jump to the William Morris Agency in Crain’s New York Business. He points to the recent six-figure sale of Danielle Trussoni‘s debut novel, Angelology, to Viking as proof that the publishing industry isn’t completely off the rails: “It was viewed as a test case, to see if we can still fall in love with a book and pay lots of money,” he says. “The answer is yes. There are still enough publishers, and few enough great books, that we can.

Links: First-Time Callers

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Sarvas, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison

Hello there. There’s a goodly chance that you’re here today because Mark Sarvas was nice enough to include this blog on his list of ten “Really, Really Smart Literary Blogs.” I feel a bit like the little old lady whose hair is still in curlers when the Prize Patrol van arrives, but I appreciate your swinging by. If this is your first time here, a few “greatest hits” posts you might want to look at: my piece on the best books of 2008, some stray thoughts on Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a few more on the future of book reviewing, a guide to Haruki Murakami‘s translations of American authors, and some thoughts about best practices about for DIY publishing. I usually do link roundup like this once a week, but as with many things in life, this is changeable. Onward.

Don DeLillo‘s America points to a cache of DeLillo radio
interviews on YouTube.

Jay McInerney talks to the Wall Street Journal about his new story collection, How It Ended which includes an update on the life of Alison Poole, the protagonist of his novel Story of My Life. Poole was modeled after one of his ex-girlfriends, Rielle Hunter, perhaps better known for her attachment to former presidential candidate John Edwards.

One less teacher is using Toni Morrison‘s Beloved in the classroom. Kids are still using The Scarlet Letter to learn about public humiliation, though.

The Daily Iowan catches up with longtime Kurt Vonnegut confidante Loree Rackstraw; make sure to check out the slideshow, which has some fine images of Vonnegutiana in Rackstraw’s home.

It’s the 25th anniversary of Sandra Cisneros‘ The House on Mango Street. At a recent event at Rice University honoring the book, she offered some of the best advice for writers I’ve heard: “First, you write like you’re talking to someone in your pajamas. Then you revise like your enemy is reading it.”