The 9/11 Novel

This chapter examines what has become known in contemporary literary scholarship, on university syllabi and beyond, as the ‘9/11 novel.’ While the 9/11 canon is undoubtedly international, it includes a heavy concentration of American novels. I focus on these texts here, both to complement Daniel O’Gorman’s chapter, ‘War on Terror,’ and because they include particularly revealing examples of features that broadly unify this body of work. I argue that the 9/11 novel has been characterized by anxiety and internal conflict relating to a set of competing impulses that pull the narratives in opposing directions. They gesture toward both the public and private, the political and the domestic, toward historical contexts and traumatic rupture. Even as they attempt to deal with trauma these competing impulses manifest in what Judith Herman calls the ‘central dialectic of psychological trauma,’ described as: ‘the will to deny horrific events and the will to proclaim them aloud’ (1992: 2). But the interpretive frame of trauma alone is limited and has frequently been identified as ethically insufficient. ¹ It doesn’t account for the complex interplay between ‘the real and the symbolic,’ which as Alex Houen has noted, has characterized terrorism for over a century (2002: 9). Nor does it account for the conflictedness that emerges in the ways 9/11 novels have simultaneously evoked rupture and historical continuity as they grapple with exceptionalist notions of 9/11 as a singular historical moment. Moreover, as Peter Boxall has noted, some of these novels have ‘staged a kind of encounter between Islam and the west’ (2013: 128). Such encounters have sometimes reinforced the crude dichotomies of ‘us and them’ or ‘victim and perpetrator’ but have invariably been fraught with conflict relating to the questions of how to represent ‘the other.’