The American Nightmare

If everything were transparent, then no ideology would be possible, and no domination either. – Jameson, The Political Unconscious Probably, there is no other concept more exploited, explored, questioned, demystified or deconstructed by the literary imagination, and by the tools of literary criticism, than the infamous “American Dream” whose failure has been pointed at every drastic turn of American history marked as a moment of crisis – the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Vietnam War, to name a few. The post-9/11 fiction contributed to the literary preoccupation with the “Dream” from within its own narrative paradigm stipulating the terms of its confrontation with an unprecedented event that was perceived to have brought “America under attack”. What seems to be new in the articulations of a shattered dream in post-9/11 narratives is the transformation of the dream into a nightmare registered in the semantic and ideological complexities of these texts. This, of course, has to do with the specificity of the event; the destruction of the twin towers which were, in the words of Habermas, “a powerful embodiment of economic strength and projection toward the future,” annulled any projection toward the future based on the strength of the world’s leading economy. The collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 was immediately imprinted on public consciousness as a moment of radical historical change, variously defined as “America’s entry into world history,” or “the end of the American holiday from history,” implicating the American subject in a period of transition marked by violence and pain. Literary response to the event has focused primarily on its traumatic impact on the American subject, evidenced in a considerably huge body of texts classified under the heading “post-9/11 fiction” indulging in loss of innocence narratives. Consequently, the child or the adult metaphorically reduced to a child-like state of incomprehension emerges as the protagonist in many novels written in response to the event. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close provides the most distinct example of such a trend with its boy-hero who, having lost his father in the attacks on the towers, tries to restore life to its pre-9/11 state of blissful innocence confined to the sphere of the private/domestic. Innocence, however, entails ignorance as well, and in the last analysis the fictional engagement with psychological aftereffects in such narratives seems to be not only an abortive attempt at a proper working through of trauma, but to have been marked with a persistent refusal to involve with the political historical implications of the event. Novels such as Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, or Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, significant though in their account of personal experience of loss and ensuing pain against a backdrop of public inscriptions of 9/11 as national tragedy and collectivized trauma, nevertheless end up reinstating the hegemonic discourse instrumentalizing trauma as they lack the clarity of vision that would assess the event’s significance in world history. The so-called entry into world history – was the U.S. ever outside world history? – becomes, therefore, a fall into the end of history in literature produced after September 11, 2001, grieving over a loss which it cannot adequately name or contextualize. The image of the falling towers compounded by the images of people falling from the towers to their death has provided a visual metaphor for the numerous falls experienced in post-9/11 narratives in which the descent from innocence to experience and to knowledge is treated in terms of a continuous fall. The suspension of movement and action on the part of the characters in these narratives is revealing of the limits of a specific ideological consciousness the texts embody. If the fall comes to an end at all its destination is a none-place outside history, following the trajectory of the literal fall that has ended in the emblematic void conveniently named Ground Zero. Hence the end-of-history and the end-of-the-world narratives marked by the limits of the ideological frame in which they are produced and beyond which they cannot go. And it is to that ideological frame informing the text’s manifest political horizons that I turn my gaze in the following study. I have chosen to limit my discussion to the two novels that I view as initiating and concluding the literary descent of the American subject into a world perceived to be no more: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man inscribes the beginning of the downward journey quite literally in the moment of the fall which is 9/11, while Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, although appearing a year later, carries the theme to the ultimate point of entropy where not only the subject but the whole world is annihilated. There is no reference to 9/11 in McCarthy’s dystopian tale of pilgrims in an utterly devastated world, yet its wandering characters follow from where DeLillo leaves his hero practically homeless in a world which has lost its referential value. The popular inscriptions of the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center as a strike at the heart of the nation permeate both texts in which the absent presence of home signifies the disappearance of homeland as a secure place in American cultural imagination. The question one character asks in Falling Man, “What comes after America?” (192), is the dreaded question both of these novels attempt to answer, albeit in their similarly pessimistic yet differently articulated political visions. In Falling Man the answer comes from a radical activist turned international art dealer: “There is an empty space where America used to be” (193). The titular road in McCarthy’s novel snakes through a nightmarish landscape where not only America, but suggestedly the world also used to be. When America is no more, the world itself ceases to exist. This is truly an American nightmare. A distinctive characteristic of the novels I have chosen for discussion is their efficiency of language with which they paradoxically comment on the failure of language at a moment of crisis. DeLillo’s narration enacts the experience of trauma that resists articulation and is replete with fissures and discontinuities that give away what the ideological system of the text represses. McCarthy’s poetic narrative which blends a number of expressive modes points more forcefully than DeLillo’s to the collapse of the symbolic order, and its language is rich with nightmarish images that irrupt into the surface of the text apropos of the intrusion of the Real into the Symbolic. I see the unique historical specificity of these novels not in terms of the old historicist reading of literary texts as reflecting a reality to which they are extrinsically related; my concern is rather with the ways in which they interact, in their linguistic and stylistic capacities, with the other texts of “9/11” and its aftermath; the (verbal and visual) textual inscriptions of the event that have instrumentalized trauma, the Patriot Act, the rhetoric of “Us and Them”, the “Axis of Evil” and the “War on Terror” that have been used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. DeLillo’s narrativization of trauma negates the alternative involving the cultivation of a healthy political public space, as Arendt would have it, as a response to terrorism as well as to the totalitarian practices of U.S. government at home, and its aggressive foreign policies. Similarly, the limited political horizon in The Road precludes the possibility of a future other than the entropy envisaged in the nightmarish descriptions of the end of the world. The logic of narrative in the McCarthy novel, in particular, strives to elude the contradictions and inconsistencies implicit in its ideological frame, while the dissonant perspectives in Falling Man are ultimately contained in the narrative return to the sit