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Representations of September 11. The book works from the position that our understanding of 9/11 is wholly dependent on the ways that various media have constructed it.
¹³ In many ways, 9/11 has followed a trajectory similar to that of the Holocaust, which in recent decades has attained the status of a traumatic event that resists representation. Indeed, as Joyce Carol Oates has remarked, addressing the difficulty of writing 9/11, “September 11 has become a kind of Holocaust subject, hallowed ground to be approached with awe, trepidation, and utmost caution.”

incapable of establishing political positions apart from state narratives. For instance, coming to terms with trauma often involves testimonial rituals in which survivors narrativize their personal experiences into more manageable frames of reference.¹⁴ In A Disorder, Marshall uses his testimony for ulterior purposes: first, sabotaging Joyce’s brother’s bachelor party and, second, making advances on Viola’s attractive elementary school teacher, Naomi. Each instance cheapens the process of testimony and precludes the opportunity for Marshall to come to terms with his experiences in genuinely productive ways. Furthermore, the book’s insistence on mocking Americans’ experience with trauma—Afghan ringtones (116), “terror sex” (23), upper-class “hostage situations” (121) children’s games that “reenact” the traumatic images of defenestration (115)—suggests that the middle class experience of 9/11 is one that is intensely tied to consumerism, patriotism, and political projects that seek to represent 9/11 as an experience available to all Americans. “It was all very thrilling,” Joyce confesses at one point (39). This dilution of trauma affects Marshall in profound ways, as, unable to distinguish his own experiences from the insincere performances of trauma that surround him, he is denied access to the traumatic Real that could potentially help him to process his experience.

This helps to explain his willingness to embrace the jingoistic manufactured narrative at the novel’s conclusion, and this general process speaks



¹⁴ See Testimony, by Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub for the most informative study on this subject. Felman and Laub describe the ways that trauma can be communicated to others through testimony, and how this process itself can produce secondary trauma for those who bear the burden of testimony.

to the ways that the spectacle attempts to co-opt discursive spaces—even those traditionally associated with modes of processing trauma—in order to deprive individuals of political agency. Marshall’s progression toward this state¹⁵ is not to be read as unique or exceptional; Kalfus suggests that the movement toward political complacency is inevitable for all Americans confronted by the state’s machinery of narrative production. He writes, “After years of tantalizing America with the potential of war, Iraq had finally aroused the nation’s patriotism, its fighting spirit, and the pleasure it took in the exercise of new technology. Now the nation was ready and even those who opposed the war tasted that longing. To their television screens they whispered, Let’s get it over with” (223). In this regard, Kalfus’ vision is darker and less optimistic than Spiegelman’s and Walter’s. Whereas the latter two writers reveal the possibility of using trauma as a tactical response to the discourses of the state, Kalfus laments the relationship between national politics and the processing of trauma, recognizing that Americans have lost their political subjectivity as a result of the rhetorical power of national narratives.

If avenues exist for contesting the state, they exist only for the reader in her encounter with narrative, and, like The Zero and In the Shadow of No Towers, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country calls into question projects of narrativization that reinforce the politics of the state. Seeing narrative as a spatial encounter
¹⁵ The narrative trajectory that Marshall follows is similar to Winston Smith’s in 1984 and R.P. McMurphy’s in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Defeated by the institutional powers that surround them, each character’s narrative arc involves a tragic movement toward political submission. The point is that individuals lack the political agency to contest or dismantle these pervasive systems of power.

allows us to create counter-spaces and counter-narratives that generate political positions that escape institutional authority. This practice furthermore positions the reader as an active participant in these political processes, and the act of producing counter-spaces and counter-narratives represents a significant vindication of reading and the power of fiction. This chapter has described narrative as a political instrument, one utilized all too often as a means of disengaging Americans from political discourse. Even as such, its spatial dimensions offer readers opportunities for establishing themselves against the politics of the state, and this process suggests the potential for reclaiming political subjectivity in an age increasingly dominated by institutional power.

The system of narrative production that I have discussed throughout this chapter would ultimately shape Americans’ perception of the chief political campaigns of both the Bush and Obama administrations: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the opening of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the eventual killing of Osama bin Laden. In each case, national narratives shaped public opinion and helped to galvanize support for costly political projects that dramatically altered America’s position in global politics. The first of these campaigns, the initiation of the “homeland security state,” is the subject of chapter two. In much the same way that the mediation of trauma that we see in Kalfus’ novel dismantles the boundaries of public and private space in the Harriman household, the rhetoric of an American “homeland” worked more broadly to blur the distinctions between the state and

the home, thus situating individuals in closer proximity to state biopower. In the following chapter, I explore how the psychological and political dimensions of domestic space worked alongside narratives that positioned America as a fortified, ideologically-pure “home” worth defending, at whatever cost. At the heart of these processes are the same forces that defined our experience of 9/11 and its aftermath: space and narrative.

CHAPTER 2
WRITING HOME: DOMESTIC SPACE AND THE AMERICAN HOMELAND

Homeland security will make America not only stronger, but, in many ways, better…And as government works to better secure our homeland, America will continue to depend on the eyes and ears of alert citizens.

President George W. Bush, “The President’s State of the Union Address, 2002”

Sit in your old rocking chair / You need not worry, you need not care / You can’t go anywhere…Too scared to think about how insecure you are / Life ain’t so happy in your little Shangri-La.

The Kinks, “Shangri-La”

On September 18^th, 2002, as part of the Lannan Foundation’s literary awards ceremony, author and activist Arundhati Roy delivered a moving speech entitled “Come September” which addressed America’s relationship to global terrorism and our country’s involvement in projects of political violence in the decades leading up to 9/11. Adopting a stance that clearly challenged narratives of America’s political innocence, Roy suggested that 9/11 opened Americans’ eyes to political violence as a very real symptom of globalization. With her speech, she sought “to share the grief of history. To thin the mists a little. To say to the

citizens of America, in the gentlest, most human way: ‘Welcome to the World’” (Roy 3). Whether Americans have become more savvy critics of global politics as a result of 9/11 is unclear, but, as Roy points out, the event forced us to consider the country within a global community, a community with complex economic, religious, and social dimensions, each equally powerful and each equally capable of producing violence. As a consequence of 9/11 and of this changing perception of America’s position in a global community, debates on national security gained newfound urgency as Americans sought to secure the homeland—both rhetorically and materially—against the threat of the foreign violence.

Underlying these impulses to protect the American homeland is a deeply rooted psychological attachment to domestic space. From the creation of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security in November of 2002 to the increasingly heated debates over illegal immigration and the tightening of the borders, Americans—contrary to Roy’s hopes—have become even more exclusionary, opting to define America as a “home” only to those who have a legitimate claim on it, whatever that might mean. Our attachment to domestic space as the predominant model for understanding the “homeland” and the “home front” is not particularly surprising, as domestic space on its most basic level suggests stability and protection, two concepts integral to nationhood. Less obvious are the ways that narrative and domestic space are intertwined and the ways that violence may infiltrate domestic space, generating traumatic ruptures that threaten to dismantle our the ideologically-constructed “homes.” Considering

the metonymic relationship between “the home” and “the nation,” two concepts that carry a great deal of cultural, historical, social, and psychological baggage, it is worth examining how our negotiation of the former bears upon our construction of the latter.

In her essay, “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space,” Amy Kaplan deconstructs the recent use of the term “homeland,” designating it as a product of a rapidly mobilizing security state. Examining the rhetorical dimensions of this new term in American politics, Kaplan argues that the proliferation of discourse on homeland security in the years following 9/11 reflects a dramatic expansion of state power and a shift in the individual’s relationship to the state. She explains, “the choice of the word puts into play a history of multiple meanings, connotations, and associations that work, on the one hand, to convey a sense of unity, security, and stability, but more profoundly, on the other hand, work to generate forms of radical insecurity by proliferating threats of the foreign lurking within and without national borders” (90). Donald Pease’s more recent critical work on the term also designates the homeland as a rhetorical device that, in dislocating U.S. citizens from their imagined “America,” justifies “the spectacular unsettling of homelands elsewhere” (170). Drawing from their and others’ work on the nation as an imagined space of domesticity, this chapter suggests that—even if the term “homeland” is new to the American political vocabulary—many of the post 9/11 discourses on homeland security

were, in fact, embedded in our cultural imagination prior to the attacks on the towers.

The anxieties over homeland security that continue to pervade the American national consciousness in many ways emerge from the processes of narrativization at the heart of domestic space. If political narratives—like those discussed in the previous chapter—are brought to life by and contained within the trope of the house, then our experience and practice of domestic space involves an implicit re-articulation of the politics of the state. Through discourses on Homeland Security, state narratives, in short, embed themselves in the practice of everyday life. James Hay’s recent article, “Designing Homes to Be the First Line of Defense: Safe Households, Mobilization, and the New Mobile Privatization” discusses the fashioning of a “moral economy” through the state’s intervention in issues of home security and personal safety. He writes, “Homeland Security is not only a matter of articulating the domestic sphere to a national and global crisis/threat but of developing and acting upon a set of technical strategies from the domestic sphere as a response to this broader crisis as a threat to a Homeland” (352). By practicing the politics of the state in the most intimate of lived spaces, individuals establish themselves as biopolitical agents, activating “technologies of the self” that enable the performance, on individual, private levels, of a national political agenda. Furthermore, internalizing state narratives in this way often results in an implicit endorsement of ideological homogeneity and state violence;

state violence is, in fact, necessary as a means of preserving ideological homogeneity.

This chapter engages two texts—Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games—to demonstrate how, no matter how exhaustively we fortify our domestic spaces, the political will always intervene and will often do so violently. Roth’s novel, written in 1997, in many ways anticipates the fears and anxieties of the post-9/11 world and furthermore attests to the fact that institutional projects of narrative production were by no means initiated by the attacks on the World Trade Center; rather, these processes have been shaping our world since the movement toward globalization and the erosion of the middle class in the latter part of the twentieth century. Both works in various guises offer commentary on an illusory American way of life embodied and articulated through the trope of the house. Here, narratives of political innocence and exceptionalism thrive within the firmly-established institution of domesticity, an institution at the heart of American discourse and identity.¹

As in the previous chapter, I am here interested in the connections between narrative, politics, and space, and specifically how the contemporary discourse on domestic terrorism and national security helps us to understand the complex workings of political narratives. These texts suggest that narrative violence—i.e. a writer’s attempt to challenge our expectations of narrative




¹ Although much has been written on gender and domestic space, this chapter is more invested in theorizing domesticity in terms of nationalism and the individual’s relationship to both the home and the nation as rhetorical constructs. In this regard, one of my aims with this chapter is to suggest new approaches to theorizing domestic space that move outside of the traditional gender paradigm.

through radical formal experiments—functions similarly to an act of domestic terrorism, as both processes seek to dismantle a political infrastructure that sustains dominant discourses of power. Demonstrating the ways that narrative desire renders us complicit in the politics of the state, these texts furthermore require us to problematize our relation to domestic space, narrative violence, and the state. Engaging narrative in both its novelistic and filmic dimensions, the following pages focus on the house as a locus for narrative production, one that, no matter how much faith we put in notions of American domesticity, is always susceptible to acts of political violence.