Discourse and Terror

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."

A Postmodern Tragedy

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.

Orpheus and Falling Man

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?

Suicide Bombings, Response, and Khadra

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?

Turner Hospital's Question of Finding Testimony to Terror

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?