Postliterature

Alexie's Literary Tunneling

2009-05-29T16:51:00.000-07:00

Sherman Alexie's Flight presents the journey of an orphaned teenager, Zits, as he inhabits the mind of various individuals throughout history. When I say inhabit, he literally enters the consciousness of various people, each representing an element in Zits's complex history. The narrative tunnels into the thoughts of various people over time, individual stories that history has overlooked. It gives voice to people and highlights the ethical dilemmas that defined them, while shedding light on the complexity of American history. The novel foregrounds the way stories can bring recognition and return voice, a self-awareness of the way literature functions in the world.

However, this self-awareness does not take the shape of historiographic metafiction like other postmodern texts. The narrator does not reflect upon the construct of the text, nor does he present an awareness of the act of writing. Flight enacts the process of reading through the narrator, Zits, who supernaturally experiences the actions and is privy to the thoughts of other individuals, while remaining conscious of his own thoughts as well. As Zits puts it, "I can fall so far inside a person, inside his memories, that I can play them like a movie." Or, as I am arguing, read them like a book.

The Past Haunting the Future

2009-05-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

Toni Morrison's Paradise disrupts and dislocates the totalizing views of race, class, and gender that an insular community constructs for itself. It does so by relocating the present inside of the knowledge of past traumas, demonstrating the inability to escape what has come before. In "From Deconstructive to Constructive Haunting in Toni Morrison's Paradise," Tammy Clewell finds constructive possibilities in this "haunting" in the way it "prevents the closure of any totalizing construction of subjectivity or homogeneous social organizations." The past virtually reopens the political and ethical discussion of identity in an essentialist community. Clewell adds, "Morrison's writing, in other words, does not tell ghost stories, at least not primarily, as a means of critiquing illusory notions of self-wholeness and social unity; the novel engages multiple figures of haunting as a work of rebuilding interior and exterior dwelling places worthy of human habitation." These worthy places are contingent upon the past and other racial, class, and gendered identities, responding to the present and historical others instead of fleeing from them. The novel, thus, raises crucial questions about the dependence of one identity upon another and the inability to maintain a community in isolation in today's world.

Foreclosure on the Wall

2009-05-14T10:02:00.000-07:00

Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall confronts the media blitz that occurred in the days directly following the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Characters routinely find themselves “in front of the TV. Watching the thing happen over and over.” The media is portrayed as ubiquitous, repetitive, and impossible to escape as the infotainment genre takes hold of its audience. Even “in a coffee shop on the boardwalk the TV was on, no escape even at the edge of the sea.” The seductive images become more and more real in their repetition and people confuse reality with the media representation. Renata, the novel’s protagonist, falls prey to the media “fantasies, she didn’t see [9/11] happen, although she’s seen it so many times since that it feels like she saw it.” The footage substitutes for her experience in that it shapes reality and ultimately becomes her perception of reality. She too is drawn in by the bright colors and music in which the news is packaged and by the horrific carnage of the footage. As a New Yorker, it is her environment that forms the backdrop for the media attention that effectively forecloses any and all reaction other than a return to the routine of everyday domestic life and blind acquiescence to authority. Schwartz focuses on the powers that define 9/11 by confronting the media aesthetic that confuses and distracts, allowing meaning to be foreclosed by a simplistic rhetoric of good and evil, vengeance and national pride. A linguistic dichotomy is formed between the simplistic explanations that basic terms offer and words that contain greater nuance and allow for a more meaningful engagement.

In The Writing on the Wall, Schwartz questions the media foreclosure and approaches the mediated trauma in a different way, by acknowledging how it takes away the voice of the victim. She allows meaning to come to the event through understanding over time instead of through a media spectacle that fills in the silence with endless voices, each a parody of the other. The ubiquitous media continues to flood the background throughout her novel to demonstrate how it shapes the American consciousness after 9/11 and influences all aspects of society. The media exists as a constant reminder of how literature needs to crack the all consuming nature of the spectacle and interrupt its influence in order to allow ethical response.

Mao Too

2009-05-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

Andy Warhol's reproductions of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong comment upon the consolidation of power the original portraits represent. The above picture hangs in The Art Institute of Chicago and clearly shows how Warhol took the iconic image posted around China and added elements. The eye shadow, rouge, and lipstick in this version, as well as various color alterations throughout the series, subvert the intentions of the original portrait to be an ubiquitous and unchanged representation of communist rule. Mao, and in particular the iconic image of the Chinese leader, became the unquestioned symbol of communism, and still are. The repetition of the original in its exact form unifies the image of power, and subsequently the political discourse, by creating a spectacle of the communist leader. Warhol's reproductions parody the original by making a spectacle of his own, shifting elements that point out the construction of the original spectacle while maintaining the essence of the original, the portrait of Mao. The subtle shift posits a new idea about communism functioning as a spectacle in the same way capitalism does. It connects a totalitarian idea to an image, one that needs to be confronted and questioned.

Don DeLillo builds upon this idea in his novel, Mao II. The image of Mao returns again and again alongside those of crowds and followers, people under the sway of the spectacle. I suggest that DeLillo's questioning of the spectacle amounts to another Mao in Warhol's line ... Mao too. Thus, the book attempts in a way to become just another in a line of reproductions that each question the original and add another turn on the totalitarianism of the image in the contemporary world.

9/11 and the Graphic Novel

2009-05-04T12:32:00.000-07:00

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation turns the 9/11 Commission report, the findings of the bipartisan committee appointed by the President, into a graphic novel. It takes the events, the testimonies, and the time lines of the terrorist events and puts them into a comic book format. The graphic novel amounts to a pastiche of the elements included in the report and images deriving from both the artist's imagination and ones mediated by broadcast and print media coverage from both the day of the attacks and political figures of the time. I want to think through what the effect is of putting the report into this aesthetic realm. Turning it into a comic should open the discussion of 9/11 to new audiences, but does it have the effect of reopening the tragedy to new interpretations?

If viewed as a reopening of the discussion, the novel can be seen as an ethical endeavor to further understandings of the tragedy. Consequently, readers may have a new engagement with the event that offers the opportunity for new responses to be formulated from a position of heightened knowledge and the awareness of diverse perspectives. However, by channeling such familiar images, mostly from media coverage, does it simply reinforce existing sentiments? The project mimics the goal of the 9/11 Commission Report, a book that attempted to report rather than engage with the event. But as a work of art, is not the burden one step further, to engage the event, rethink it, ask new questions? I don't know that the graphic novel has this impact.

Absence and Everything in It

2009-04-30T09:50:00.000-07:00

Jess Walter's The Zero takes its title from the absence of the twin towers and the holes they left in the American psyche, or maybe not. It is a valid question to ask if the towers left any hole at all. The structure of Walter's novel contains as many holes, gaps, and questions as can be imagined. However, those gaps are quickly filled by a society wanting to quickly fill the gap with meanings and perceptions that make sense, avoiding the void that might lead deeper into the subject. This comes through when Remy, the central figure of the text, remains in a state between consciousness and unconsciousness, unsure whether he is dreaming or thinking:

"A dream - that would help explain the gaps, and the general incongruity of life now - the cyclic repetition of events on cable news, waves of natural disasters, scientists announcing the same discoveries over and over (Planet X, dinosaur birds, cloning, certain genetic codes), the random daily shift of national allegiances, wildly famous people who no one could recall becoming famous, the sudden emergence and disappearance of epidemics, the declaration and dissolution of governments, cycles of scandal, confession, and rehabilitation, heated elections in which losers claimed victory and races were rerun in the same sequence, events that catapulted wildly out of control, like plagues of illogic ..."

Are these what exist in the state between consciousness and unconsciousness, possibly where we all exist today? The text depicts a culture that is not enlightened to the point that it can accept the void and discover the meanings from within it. Rather, society tends to overlay pop culture and populous understanding atop the void.

Mediated Cultural Experiences

2009-04-29T13:54:00.000-07:00

Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats connects two important aspects of the contemporary world, the media and the politics of the body. Her novel brings together issues of race, reproduction, and the side effects of drug use in the meat industry with the way transnational media influences culture. Jane, the Japanese-American protagonist, directs tv programs about American wives cooking meat dishes to be aired in Japan with the intent to increase meat sales. The sponsor, Beef-ex, an American beef export company remains in the background as the figure of the multinational corporation that has a greater influence on the body than one might imagine. The text ties together the narrative of the production of the program with the story of a Japanese housewife who watches the program to highlight the responsibility of transnational media when challenging cultural norms.

On one hand, the program has an overt goal of producing cultural change; it aims to influence meat consumption in Japan by proffering a vision of the happy, American family eating meat. It sells meat through its association with American values, amounting to what many call cultural imperialism. Media theorist James Lull explains this viewpoint as "a process that homogenizes thought and experience, destroys local cultures, exploits their populations and makes way too much money for the anonymous, often foreign corporate producers." However, Lull argues that this argument does not hold much weight. "Even the most fundamental idea that widespread representation of cultural forms leads to undifferentiated reception of those forms - an unstated assumption that underlies the usual critical argument - simply does not hold." Contemporary media allows for interactive engagement through a variety of communication technologies making the homogenization of culture more complicated.

The novel complicates the view by showing the multiple and singular nature of the American family. Jane takes the responsibility to show the diversity of the American family while challenging the influence of the sponsor by focusing on more than just beef. Jane creates a needed tension between the goals of the sponsor and the show. Thus, she complicates the cultural influence of the program, and as a result, produces a different outcome than expected, demonstrating how the media can be a positive tool for change across borders.

Furthermore, the body remains the central focus of both the program and the text, as the issue of meat production comes to the forefront. Specifically, the effect of harmful drugs used in feed lots and slaughterhouses on human reproduction, antibiotic effectiveness, and other side effects.

The media can make people aware of the problems, but the text specifically highlights the ineffectiveness of the media to create changes in individual behavior. Jane explains the difficulty of linking media information to action. "Coming at us like this - in waves, massed and unbreachable - knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment - becomes bad knowledge - so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness." The realization throws another wrench into the battle over the body for Jane. "Ignorance is an act of will," she explains, "a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence." Thus, she realizes her limitations and attempts to go outside of the mainstream by producing unique programing that confronts the politics of the body. Even thought she realizes the effect may be limited, she still pushes forth, and in the end, changes one Japanese woman who contacts her seeking a new life for herself and her child based upon the diverse views she saw in Jane's programs. Diversity prevailed, even in the media.

Discourse and Terror

2009-04-19T12:13:00.000-07:00

Paul Auster's Leviathan foregrounds the way a particular discourse is contingent upon a narrative construct. What a person sees in a situation depends upon the stories that she puts faith in, a perspective built upon communication. The viewpoints of the characters in the novel are each dependent upon who they trust and what story they believe. For example, the narrator, Peter Aaron, comes to understand the differing points of view of a relationship when his friend, Ben Sachs, describes his marital situation differently than his wife Fanny. Ben lies to her to keep her happy, fabricating stories of infidelity to maintain his wife's interest in him. "Words have power, after all." And Ben describes the way the stories "were all very real to her."

When Ben Sachs becomes a terrorist, bombing replicas of the Statue of Liberty, it is to confront the prevailing discourse of freedom in the U.S. "He simply wanted America to look into itself and mend its ways. In that sense, there was something almost Biblical about his exhortations, and after a while he began to sound less like a political revolutionary than some anguished, soft-spoken prophet." Ben aspires to reopen the discussion of what freedom means and not allow a statue to be a misguided icon that people hide behind. This use of bombs to send a message might be "[u]nlike the typical terrorist pronouncement," but it brings to the forefront the idea of terrorism as discourse, violence that attempts to hijack the discourse and put forth its own message. However, the text's critical awareness is always focused on particular perspectives. Terror, thus, amounts to one perceptive, and even though it dominates the headlines due to fear and horror, it must be dealt with through discursive means.

The question then becomes, what is literature's role in this mess? Can writers, in the novel's case both Ben Sachs and Peter Aaron, effectively shape discourse so that terrorism will not? Paul Auster does not answer these questions because Ben becomes the terrorist as a result of his inability to influence political dialogue, and Peter writes to challenge the inevitable opinions that will be formed when the government learns that Ben Sachs is the bomber called the "Phantom of Liberty."

Photograph from September 11

2009-04-10T11:13:00.001-07:00

by Wislawa Szymborska

They jumped from the burning floors—
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.

The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.

Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.

There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.

They’re still within the air’s reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.

I can do only two things for them—
describe this flight
and not add a last line.

Translated by Clare Kavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

A Postmodern Tragedy

2009-04-08T12:20:00.001-07:00

I am about to launch into reading texts that deal with postmodernism, terrorism, and 9/11, so I am thinking through the particular aspects of the World Trade Center attacks that make them particularly postmodern. The amatuer and professional footage, the global media networks, the discussions that have carried on through new media, and the terrorists capitalizing on an unwittingly complicit media all make this a particular postmodern tragedy. The question I have is, how can literature shed new light on a decidedly new media event? What is it about literature that makes this possible?

I will always hold to my argument that literature asks unanswerable questions that push the dialogue into new territory. The media foreclosure of the discourse in the post 9/11 world can be confronted anew by literary texts that refocus the discussion on individuals coping with the repercussions of the tragedy and the way it played out in the sphere of new media. Furthermore, literature slows the engagement from its hyperspeed on global networks that infultrate public space and shape cultural memory. The process of reading allows for careful consideration by a lone reader, allowing singular responses to take shape instead of mass consensus. Lastly, many texts not only respond to the tragedy but allow for new responses as well, literature's response-ability.

Biopower's Limit

2009-02-17T13:11:00.000-08:00

"You feel that force there on your hand? That's the world. The story of the world is the story of force. It's just some people are better at applying it than others." Torture brings Glen Duncan's protagonist to this realization. In A Day and a Night and a Day, torture amounts to a means of not only collapsing time, as I posed in my previous post, but to a means of collapsing the world in on itself for the tortured, to creating bare life. Torture, thus, amounts to the limit of biopower, the extreme form of enacting power upon a body. It takes voice, Elaine Scarry's point, and it makes one lose faith in the world, Jean Amery's famous words. It leaves the tortured with a single certainty, the body, and the simple realization that the world works by enacting power on the body. Duncan's text explores these ideas and asks what is left once one comes to that conclusion: memory, love, moments in time?

Torture, Memory, and the State

2009-02-14T12:32:00.000-08:00

Glen Duncan's A Day and a Night and a Day uses torture as a mnemonic device, provoking questions about the way atrocious acts make one investigate the past. The use of mnemonic devices in literature recalls more subtle moments where involuntary memory is provoked, such as Proust's famous biscuit in In Search of Lost Time. Duncan's novel also links to the cliche of one's life flashing before one's eyes, as in Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide, where a man recalls his life as he is trapped drowning between rocks beneath the surface of a river. However, Duncan's use of torture as mnemonic device asks a larger question about the way a country re-envisions its past from the new position of torturer. The tortured subject in the text recalls his past as a black man in America during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam era, allowing the text to revisit questions of race and war, linking them to the tortured present and future.

Torture becomes a sort of tumor in society in the same way the Vietnam war was. Duncan uses the My Lai massacre to make his point: "Whatever you thought of war, soldiers in it became the bearers of the world's strange tidings. Among which was the news from My Lai. America faced a tumorous question about itself from its own sons." Duncan's example forms a link between the way Vietnam, specifically the My Lai massacre, made Americans see themselves in a new light and the way torture should do the same. Both Vietnam and today's war on terrorism amount to exceptional circumstances where otherwise unheard of acts are carried out or justified based on the emergency at hand. The question becomes, do we, as a nation, treat the atrocious act as a mnemonic device or a convenient failure of memory justified by the exceptional circumstances? Duncan prefers the former.

Orpheus and Falling Man

2009-02-14T01:45:00.000-08:00

The image from the action theatre group PAN.OPTIKUM recalls the photo of the "Falling Man" (refer to my previous post) from 9/11 about which DeLillo writes in his novel of the same name. It forms a connection between two texts, DeLillo's and Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost. Like the above image, both texts follow a descent and are reminiscent of the myth of Orpheus, with towers falling, terrorism, and a journey into an unknown underworld. But the descents amount to journeys that attempt to reclaim a lost love. Orpheus descended into hell on a quest to reunite with Eurydice, but he looked back before they surfaced and broke his deal with the devil. The characters in each of the contemporary novels seek a lost love, but seem to have learned the lesson of Orpheus, not to look too closely before it has returned. Can we apply this to contemporary politics, terrorism, and texts?

U.S./Somalia Links, Associative Meanings

2008-11-05T08:30:00.000-08:00

Nuruddin Farah has complicated ideas about the U.S.'s role in Somalia, and he forms associations in his novel that bring those complexities to the fore. He sees the difficulties of international intervention in his country, as well as the necessity. Farah, however, makes a distinction between helping the other and helping one's self. Farrah points to the difficult relationship between the effort on the ground in the U.S./U.N. intervention, and the media portrayal of the situation that has the ability to sway public opinion. Farah posits the idea that American foreign policy is as much a TV show as anything else, "a circus for the benefit of prime-time TV back home." The link between the media and American identity makes it hard for motives to be seen as altruistic (all the more appropriate that I use an image from a movie to begin this post).

The complexity of the situation is also written in religious terms. One of Farah's protagonists explains his "misgivings about saints and angels ... especially as I fear that people describe the Yankees as 'good angels' come on a humanitarian mission, to perform God's work here. Do you think Yankees ceased being angels, because of the conditions met here, conditions that wouldn't permit them to perform any work but Satan's? When do angels cease to be angels and resort to being who they are, Yankees?" Farah embeds religious terms in the political questions in an way that draws the two together.

The links he forms ask the crucial questions. How does the media influence foreign policy and subsequently the lives of individual Somalis? How can humanitarian goals be forgotten so quickly when things begin to go wrong on the ground? And then link the two - the media, humanitarian ideals gone wrong - an ethical imbalance?

Inhabiting Political Art

2008-10-31T09:18:00.000-07:00

Must an artist inhabit the role she presumes to represent? How does this role connect to the political revolutionary?

Bile, one of Nuruddin Farah's protagonists in Links, explains, "an artist representing an image cannot presume to be an artist unless he is able to be the very figure being represented. Likewise, a man with a radical image who's spent years in detention for political reasons must act forthrightly and without fear of the consequences."

The comment links the artist and the radical. Both must act forthrightly and without fear to have an impact. But, what does it mean to be the figure being represented? An artist can inhabit the revolutionary role with an imagination that builds characters, scenes, and story through links to the real. Or, the artist can be the firgure represented and present a realist version of events from personal memory in order to convey a political point. The artist can be either inside or outside, but either way must present a threshold for the reader to pass through, which evokes meaning and provokes response. How does the artist reach that point?

A Poet, a Picture, and a Gun

2008-10-25T11:43:00.000-07:00

This poem is a gun

This poem's an assassin

Images mob my mind …

This pen’s a spear, a knife

A branding-iron, an arrow

Tipped with righteous anger

It writes with blood and bile
- Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’

Art's warfare ... from where does it derive its power?

War's Missed Connections

2008-10-03T09:27:00.000-07:00

"In the shadows of war and politics there came to be surreal turns of cause and effect."

This line from Anil's Ghost possessed me while I was reading the first part of the book. The unreal aspects of war, the horror, the trauma, collapse all sense of truth and understanding, history and memory. Ondaatje explores how fear infiltrates a country so pervasively that nobody can recognize the reality of individual lives. Is this what happens in all wars? Cause and effect become propaganda and history the fiction written in a time of exception?

The text explores these questions but also initiates a response. It attempts to empower mechanisms to bridge the gap between past and present, the bones of the dead that lie in the earth, the stories of relatives, literature. How do we read the surreal world that disconnects life from its own story?

We Varied Nomads

2008-10-01T09:04:00.000-07:00

A Distant Shore sets up a comparison between the way two people travel. One, an immigrant, crossing and recrossing borders until he comes to live in an England he did not expect. Another, a long-time resident who does not recognize England after living there her entire life. The effects on each vary, but they both take journeys in an effort to find a place in the world. And, they both lose a sense of self, changing throughout the text while attempting to recover the past.

"If I do not share my story, then I have only this one year to my life. I am a one-year-old man who walks with heavy steps. I am a man burdened with hidden history."

Memory, story, voice, is literature an act of recovery? Does it provide the journey we all need to take to find/see purpose and gain a sense of self? Is this only an insight the nomad can realize, having crossed into different perspectives to gain her or his own?

Denizen Memories

2008-09-24T09:09:00.000-07:00

In A Distant Shore, Gabriel comes to the realization that he must leave his country. All that has happened to him must be pushed aside as he flees at all cost, trying to get to England. And as he does so, he leaves behind everything, even his memories, to transform.

"Gabriel knows that if he is going to live again then he will have to learn to banish all thoughts of his past existence. There can be no sentiment. Hurtling blindly down this highway, he knows that if he is lucky the past will soon be truly past, and that with every gasp of the acrid air beneath the heavy tarpaulin, life is taking him beyond this nightmare and to a new place and a new beginning."

In effect, Gabriel becomes the exception, leaving everything to enter into the unknown, at once citizen and not citizen, forgetting in order to create new memories, starting life over after having lived too much. He embodies the changes that occur to the traveler, but how does it compare to the England he finds upon arrival? How is the memory of the past in play for both the immigrant and the citizen? Do they both embody the nomadic state? Does the immigrant, as the exception, force the resident of a country to see themself differently?

The NGO Challenge

2008-09-03T08:25:00.001-07:00

Some argue that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) offer a challenge to traditional politics and the State. This becomes all the more apparent in the transnational world where borders are more fluid and temporary communities are built out of necessities. In Bel Canto, all of these aspects come into play in the figure of Messner, the representative of the Red Cross. He wields a kind of power no other person in the text maintains.

Messner's "manner was so calm, so seemingly unaware of the chaos that surrounded them, that he could have been taking s Sunday morning collection. The Red Cross was always there to help the victims of earthquakes and floods, the very ones Vice President Iglesias was sent to comfort and assess ... 'The Red Cross,' he said to the bank of guns behind him."

Where does his power, or an NGO's power come from? Is it the way they stand on a higher ethical ground that gives them protection above others, akin to clerical or some other status outside of normal relations? How does Messner embody the state of exception, and what critical ground does that offer us as readers?

An Aesthetic of Memory

2008-09-02T21:28:00.001-07:00

The "garua," a mist that isn't a mist, the fog that is not a fog, forms a thick barrier that hovers around the house forming an even deeper isolation in which the hostages in Bel Canto find themselves. It is the manifestation of their seperation from the world, while new connections are being formed in the inner space demarkated by the "garua." Memory is the only link to the outside world for them, and it is provoked by music.

"He could only hear the notes, the clear resonance of her voice, like when he was a boy and would run down the hill past the convent, how he could hear just a moment of the nuns' singing, and how it was better that way, to fly past it rather than to stop and wait and listen. Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement. hearing her sing now ... was like that. It was like hearing one bird answer another when you can only hear the reply and not the plintive, original call" (99-100).

If an aesthetic is defined as a quality of artistic production that elicits an emotive reaction from the viewer, a sensory value of sorts that opens art to values of judgement and sentiment, does Bel Canto put forth an aesthetic of memory? If so, it seems to act in similar ways across the group of hostages and terrorists alike. What does it mean that it crosses borders and acts nomadically, connecting to the past while also helping to construct a unique community in the present? What are the productive possibilities?

Collisions of Community

2008-09-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

Ann Patchett's Bel Canto forces readers to think about community and the diverse communal nature of our transnational society. This may seem difficult in a book about terrorists taking hostages at a birthday party. But is it just such trauma, the international cast, and the unique foundations on which the cast of characters is brought together that offer the most poignant questions. The uncertainty, the temporary nature of the situation, and the connections across various boundaries add to the mix.

What constitutes a community and binds it together in the contemporary world? What roles/subject positions are most vital to a transnational community? Are fleeting communities always formed out of trauma, temporary and necessary to escape a distinct threat?

The Falling Man

2008-08-14T11:18:00.000-07:00

Google "falling man" and this image comes up time and time again. I will follow suit and post the image, but with the pertinent question: is it ethical to post this image? Also, how does the photograph function today?

DeLillo's novel Falling Man refers to this famous picture. In the text, a performance artist recreates the photo by placing himself at strategic locations around the city and jumping from a building tethered by a single rope. In the process, he assumes the position of the man in the photo. DeLillo's text asks the important question: "Falling Man as Hearless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror" (220).

I believe DeLillo is asking us to remain shocked out of our daily routines, not to let 9/11 become simple history, and relearn the lessons of the event each day. Is this giving too much value to terrorism? Is performance art that interrupts our daily lives an important aspect in postmodern society? If art does not interrupt, what will?

Solid Signifiers

2008-07-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

After presents a question about identity that continues to provoke diverse thoughts in me. The wife whose husband dies in a terrorist incident, views video of the husband being questioned before he is killed. She describes the situation:

"When those men asked my husband if he was a Jew, he said, 'Yes, I am a Jew.' He didn't say, 'No, I'm an individual ... An individual. What's that? Individuals are all the same, you know. Cut off from what they are. They are nothing at all. It's the context that matters ... I wonder could you do that? Give up everything, your family, your life, just for once to be completely what you are?" (132-133).

The wife believes that one needs a solid identity marker to define ones character. She believes that the husband's unwillingness to shy away from his identity is valiant, even though he is depicted as "Not a good Jew," whatever that means (133). I simply question the validity of that type of overarching identity signifier in today's world. Is there one thing that defines any of us that we hold onto completely and would give up our individualism for? Is that called patriotism, loyalty, fanaticism....? The context she speaks of seems to be a large identity affiliation, but don't we more actively identify with smaller more localizes identities which we inhabit on a daily basis? Things like community, family, ethics formed based on experiences within a more localized context? Is the solid marker of religion or culture what we truly "are" more than family, relationships, community? Could you, would you, give up your family for the sake of some more grand narrative?

Terrorism as Event

2008-07-27T11:02:00.000-07:00

Claire Tristram's After is a disturbing view of one woman's struggle to come to terms with her husband's death at the hands of terrorists. I have not come to terms with the questions the text asks, but one thing is for certain, terrorism acts as an interruption to the life of the protagonist in a way that shifts the ground under her feat.

"Alternatively she wished for a disaster, like the ones they had imagined for one another the night before; a pox, a plague, a pure, holy terror event after which all that had come before would be erased in a brilliant white light, rendered irrelevant from one searing moment to the next, so that all the world could experience the same dislocation that she had. The shattered pieces would rearrange themselves eventually. Life would go on. But no one would return to the before-place, when everything was ordered and complete" (177).

If terrorism acts as an event that interrupts the status quo and puts us on new ground, does that mean it is an effective means of changing the world? What does it mean to desire that kind of dislocation of identity and attempt, as takes place in the book, to provoke this type of shift? Is that what art does already, or can art shift the ground beneath our feet to invoke a more ethical society to the degree that political dissidents will not need to use violence as a means of political action?

Nurruddin Farah's Ethical Anecdote

2008-07-08T11:13:00.001-07:00

As I read Somali writer Nurruddin Farah's Links, I have come across an example that goes a long way to portraying the conflicting influences that embody the conflict in the country.

Farah's protagonist, Jeebleh, a Somali ex-patriot living in the U.S. but returned to uncover the events of his mother's death, witnesses "a boy in a fancy cowboy hat and jeans, ruthlessly hitting an Alsatian with a stick ... The pregnant dog was writhing in agony, and actively giving birth ... a pure-bred Alsatian in today's Mogadiscio ... the dog had once belonged to an Englishman, formerly of the BBC African Service, who had been seconded to the city by UNOSOM" (129). Jeebleh intervenes, finds the dog shelter, even covering the puppies with his jacket.

To the American reader, the ethics here seem obvious; the dog is being physically harmed and one must come to its aid. Shit, there is even a TV show about animal cops where we enjoy watching these crusaders save desperate animals and lock away the offenders.

However, Jeebleh is vilified for his behavior. His acts amount to dirtying himself by actually touching a dog and offending the others present. Farah uses the example to establish the cultural divide between his English speaking readers and the locals. But it also posits the contradiction of a society enamored with American culture, envisaged in the "cowboy hat and jeans," saddled with the legacy of colonialism, the BBC man's dog, and at odds with the helping hand of NGO's, "UNOSOM." It is a conflict that plays out between the western world's ideology of individualism that infiltrates Somali culture yet conflicts with the traditional clan-based rule. The essence of the political problem of the country lies somewhere in the conflicting ideals of clan vs. individual.

The example embodies the political misunderstandings that outsiders bring to bare on Somalia and other African nations. The question is thus, how do we approach the situation? With an eye for the individuals who are suffering, which seems to be the only thing that draws our attention? How do we give due consideration to the local customs?

A Comment on Khadra at Strangled Sleep

2008-06-29T21:51:00.000-07:00

The following is from an entry at http://strangledsleep.blogspot.com/ ....

The Return of the Jewish Nose: Reading Yasmina Khadra's The Attack

Unless you are a fan of Tex-Mex, truck with balls, scorching heat, and museums commemorating George W. Bush, there are very few reasons to spend the summer in southeast Texas. But I happen to be here visiting someone, and so I’ve taken the opportunity to sit in on his Texas A&M University class on contemporary world literature, where the focus is literature and terrorism.

For today, we read Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack (2007). Khadra (his real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul) is a former Algerian army officer turned novelist, and this novel, despite its unsophisticated writing style, does a pretty good job of getting college students to think and talk about terrorism in an unfiltered way. The only problem is that the book is so severely biased against Israelis and Jews that one wonders how unfiltered the discussion can truly be.

The storyline goes something like this: Arab-Israeli surgeon is called to the hospital where he learns his wife has been killed in a restaurant bombing. He later finds out that his wife was in fact the suicide bomber. The rest of the book, with all of its undeveloped plot threads, is about his attempts to uncover her secret life and come to grips with what he sees as her betrayal of him. The important thing to note is that it’s not that he needs to come to grips with what his wife has done to innocent men, women, and children in a crowded restaurant, but with what he sees as her personal betrayal of him.

A bit self-absorbed, no?

It’s not that the novel doesn’t tell a good story or address timely issues. It definitely kept me reading, but perhaps that was also because of the all but latent anti-Semitism that kept jumping out at me. Like many people, I tend to like to stare at things that repulse me. Although I run the risk of sounding like an anti-Semitic ambulance chaser, it is difficult not to read between the lines when nearly every time Khadra’s narrator introduces a new Jewish character, he refers to his “unattractive nostrils” or depicts him looking down his “nose” at the narrator. Or, in the absence of the description of a character’s unflattering nose, he depicts them as fat, selfish, and always gobbling things up.

.... continued at http://strangledsleep.blogspot.com/

Open Thread

2008-06-26T06:42:00.001-07:00

Shopping or Protest on Saturday

2008-06-26T06:34:00.000-07:00

"It isn't rationalism that will overcome the religious zealots, but ordinary shopping and all that it entails - jobs for a start, and peace, and some commitment to realisable pleasures, the promise of appetites sated in this world, not the next. Rather shop than pray." (127)

Saturday explores the tension between the self and the world and how one situates both thinking for oneself and thinking globally at the same time. The above quote, which resonates with comments made by both our President and Vice President, seems to say that the balance is maintained by shopping. The text seems somewhat at odds with this type of understanding with its constant reference to social involvement and political discussion. So, where is the balance? How does this tie in with religion in both the fundamentalist terrorist way and in an everyday American way?

Open Thread

2008-06-22T11:29:00.001-07:00

Suicide Bombings, Response, and Khadra

2008-06-22T11:11:00.001-07:00

Yasmina Khadra does not give us the full motivation of the female suicide bomber in The Attack. He leaves the idea of an embodied bomb out there to consrast with other ideas in the book. It is juxtaposed against the character of Amin, a selfish doctor who chooses life in medical care but is as selfish as a bomber when it comes to personal motivations. The suicide attack is positioned against Israel's airstrike response. These juxtapositions bring up questions but do not define. What are we to take from that idea?

Talal Asad writes of suicide bombers "that motives in general are more complicated than is popularly supposed and that the assumption that they are truths to be accessed is mistaken: the motives of suicide bombers in particular are inevitably fictions that justify our responses but that we cannot verify" (3). If this is true, what does Khadra and maybe even literature in general provide? A verification or new assumption to add to the list? Or, does lit have a productive insight, method, or idea to posit that will challenge our thought process in a productive way? If so, how does Khadra carry it out?

Open Thread: The Cyclist

2008-06-17T06:53:00.001-07:00

Politics, Community, and The Cyclist

2008-06-17T06:17:00.000-07:00

The Cyclist portrays a cycle of violence that moves forward indiscriminately through attacks that seem to be without political motivation. But the text does not withdraw from politics, it places its message in the body of those involved mainly through food. The central position of food and its use as metaphor for violence as well as its actual role as sustenance, not to mention that food is the narrator's reason for living, means that politics needs to be thought through food.

Food contains communal properties as representative, conduit for bringing people together, etc. Its position in the center of the text means all political messages must move through some idea of what food means. I want to suggest that Viken Berberian is more concerned about the communities being destroyed in Mid-East violence, envisioned through food, than the actual politics of the Nations involved. In what ways does the author develop this idea through more than just food?

Open Thread: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

2008-06-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

Intertextuality: Camus, and Hamid

2008-06-10T06:50:00.000-07:00

The relationship between Camus and Hamid is immediately apparent when comparing The Fall and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Hamid models the structure of his text on that of Camus, a conversation between two men taking place mainly in a bar. But Camus's themes are what resonate in the contemporary text. Complicity, lack of innocence, and a paramount event that changes the central character are at the forefront of both texts. But the question I have is, what do they have to do with terrorism?

Open Thread: Due Preparations for the Plague

2008-06-05T11:08:00.000-07:00

Turner Hospital's Question of Finding Testimony to Terror

2008-06-05T06:43:00.000-07:00

Trauma contains within it an essential ambiguity. The terrorist act invokes this absence. The various networks within our society - media, government, ngo's - capitalize on the absence to foreclose the meaning of the event. They ursurp the voices of the dead and fill in their own discourse in what amounts to realpolitik. Yet, the question remains, how do we see the event for what it is, finding testimony to trauma?

"The dead never stop telling stories. Those whom we have betrayed, no matter how pure our intent, how scrupulous our reasons, they tell their tales to us night after night, which is why some of you will lose all capacit to sleep" (270). Janette Turner Hospital understands that the story lies with the dead, the intefral insight of Primo Levi comes through here. But somewhere between the loss of testimony and the foreclosure by outside means is an ethical way forward, investigating the event and responding to it. Giorgio Agamben explains that it is in understanding the absence and directing our attention to the middle ground. "Survovors bore witness to something it was impossible to bear witness to," according to Agamben (13). With this understanding, is Due Preparations for the Plague seeking a new ethical territory to respond to the essential absence that terrorism provokes? Are "due preparations" not simply ways of preventing terrorism, but ways of dealing with the aftermath?

The Artist and Terror

2008-06-05T06:22:00.000-07:00

Due Preparations for the Plague is filled with intertextual elements that play diverse roles in the text. Epigraphs are used to bring other voices to bare on the text. The structure used can be and has been compared to that of Dante's famed Inferno. But I want to think through how these other texts and artists - those both outside, inside, and situated in some liminal relationship to the text - add questions and engage terrorism.

"We ignore, therefore, at our peril the artist's insight. It is the artist-it is Homer-who observes and names Achilles' heel" (230).

"Do you think it was the plague-the plague itself-the Boccaccio, Defoe, and Camus all sought, with such frantic scribbling, to keep at bay? ... No. I can attest to this: no" (270).

Janette Turner Hospital posits a few ideas on the topic. From these quotes, we see that art works in different ways. But in the contemporary world, is art able to add critical insight into terrorism? What does art keep at bay in the face of terror?

Due Preps for Janette Turner Hospital

2008-06-02T13:12:00.000-07:00

Janette Turner Hospital approaches fear from a different impulse in her prescient novel Due Preparations for the Plague. She situates terrorism and the fear it invokes as analogous to the plague, victims waiting for a vile death to take them indiscriminately from their lives. When she began writing the novel prior to the events of September 11, 2001, she could not have known how her ideas would resonate with the largest media event of our time and that the culture of fear would grow so pervasive as to make her critique all the more salient. After 9/11, she did not deny the impact of that day on finishing the text. In an interview with Eleanor Hall, Turner Hospital describes her reaction to the recorded voices of the victims experiencing the tragedy, “there was a sort of radiant calm to them and they wanted to tell the people they loved that they loved them, and I was unprepared for that, you know, and it altered very much the tone of the end of the novel.” Turner Hospital heard the opposite of fear in those voices, that impending death inside of a catastrophic event does not destroy the voice but empowers a final message of hope. Terrorism did not close off the voices of its victims; the voices rose up from the aftermath of the event to inspire and comfort n a time of uncertainty, especially for the families of victims, but also for those left wondering what would become of the world.

Janette Turner Hospital challenges readers to look at the culture of fear that persists in the face of terrorism in a new light. The text examines the importance of critical engagement to take us beyond recognizing the event and into a space where critical engagement can begin to take us beyond the spectacle of terrorism. Both are stories of foreclosure that show how voices are closed off by the fear mongering mechanisms of society, the media and the government, and demonstrate the impact of silencing the voices of individuals.

Turner Hospital takes a transnational view of terrorism, one that crosses borders and forges connections across impossible boundaries to show the global reach of terrorism while envisioning its impact on two people. She explores how government conspiracy functions in the same manner as the spectacle to foreclose lives and empower fear in the aftermath of terrorism.

For Turner Hospital, the text takes a realistic look at the way we prepare for terrorism by asking, “how do we ready ourselves for what might happen tomorrow? What possible preparations can be made?” (401). Each demonstrates how fear is the means through which the unknown becomes palpable in a time of uncertainty, and when societal forces capitalize on fear, art needs to go beyond the foreclosure of the media and the government to critically engage the spectacle of terrorism, bringing about an ethical discourse that allows subjects to live without perpetual fear.

Information as......

2008-05-31T14:21:00.000-07:00

"The chorus of radio and television, the slow build of plasma image and newspaper and magazine photograph, the rising leafstorm of banners and newsflashes not only made any error impossible to rectify, they made errors the truth, the truth became of no consequence, and the world a hell for those whom it randomly chose to persecute." (Unknown Terrorist 290)

In the current and increasing state of globalization, the world has unified into a single gaze that views events through a media that circulates information immediately, constantly, and ubiquitously. Richard Flanagan examines how the media picks and chooses how and who to focus the gaze upon, creating a story out of a person's life that may or may not involve the truth. Either way, the story becomes reality, shaping public imagination around a constructed idea. Can or does this amount to terrorism? It may be a bomb of sorts, at least Paul Virilio would describe it as such. Does it function as a spectacle, ala terrorism? Or does it have distinctly different qualities? With regard to Flanagan's passage above, what do we call our propensity for information?

Flanagan and Fear

2008-05-31T14:04:00.000-07:00

“A subtle fear has entered Tasmanian life; it stifles dissent and is conducive to the abuse of power. To question or to comment is to invite the possibility of ostracism and unemployment.” These remarks by Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan would prove to be true after they appeared in an April 21, 2004 article in the British paper The Guardian. The article, about the clear cutting of forests on Flanagan’s home island, criticized the close ties between the government and the Gunns corporation, Australia’s largest logging company holding a monopoly in Tasmania. Flanagan did not anticipate the backlash he would receive from the Tasmanian Premier, Parliament, and the local media that were all critical of his opinion being voiced in a foreign venue that brought local politics to international attention. In remarks made later, Flanagan describes how he realized at that point the power of the media to create an image of a person that has nothing to do with reality. The false identity amounts to an ad homonym attack foreclosing the point of criticism and stifling dissent.

Flanagan’s latest novel, The Unknown Terrorist, derives from the context of the writer’s personal controversy to explore the way the media capitalizes on public concerns about terrorism to construct a story and a new identity of one woman as a terrorist that has no basis in reality. I argue the media construction amounts to a spectacle that forecloses identity based on fear and allows terrorism to succeed because transnational terrorism is a media spectacle. Flanagan attempts to engage this issue by going beyond the media spectacle and beyond the spectacle of terrorism by asking the questions regarding fear and terror that make readers “question and comment” in ways that engage the issues rather than buy into an emotional reaction perpetuated by the government and the media. The text is Flanagan’s means of fighting against “the politicians and the security forces and the journalists, who, instead of protecting people, also betrayed them” (Unknown Terrorist 186).

Set in Sydney, the novel explores the nuances of how the fear of transnational terrorism dominates the local imagination. Even though Australia has been relatively secure, fear becomes the primary mechanism through which the people view the world and is used to define every aspect of those around them. “People like fear. We all want to be frightened and we all want somebody to tell us how to live” (Unknown Terrorist 166). Fear is the means through which the unknown becomes palpable in a time of uncertainty, and when societal forces capitalize on fear, art needs to go beyond the recognition the media spectacle provides to critically engage the topic and bring about an ethical solution.