Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Works by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Simon Armitage and Mohsin Hamid are discussed in relation to the specific problems of writing about such a visually spectacular 'event' that has had enormous global implications.
Get A Copy. Hardcover , pages. More Details Other Editions 3. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list ». Community Reviews. Showing Rating details. All Languages. More filters. Sort order. Johnston rated it it was amazing May 10, Jay Shelat rated it really liked it Jul 05, Sini rated it liked it Nov 13, Aliette rated it liked it Jul 22, Joyce Grant rated it it was amazing Nov 01, Caroline rated it liked it Mar 11, Alice Rowan rated it it was amazing Jan 16, Henry Stanton added it Sep 09, Mai Fathy marked it as to-read Aug 07, The violent act of confining the seamstress was a common thing in the XIX century, like many others taken in the name of progress and explored in the narrative.
In this sense, the author ends up questioning a crucial aspect of the psychoanalyst definition of trauma, that is, the external agent. The novella in fact reveals a history of violence perpetrated from within the American society and not from outside. Consequently, other discourses, like the one spread by the media in general and the American government after September 11, cannot take place here although it does in many other novels , for they contend that America was a victim of an external threat — Islamism.
How is it possible for America, regarded as the land of democracy and justice for the official discourse, to be attacked by a foreign enemy who launched an era of terrorism, if terror was something already undertaken within and encouraged by the same society? In general, they tend to incorporate predominant motifs of insecurity and establishing characters — and American society at large — as victims.
What is striking is that Cunningham goes further and not only displaces trauma from September 11, but also presents an ambiguous view of the 'original accident'. At once, sorrow and fascination are set in motion in what can be considered the beginning of the modern trauma. Therefore, the idea of an experience with an unpleasant and negative impact on psyche, as supposed by Freud, is replaced by controversial meanings. In Cunningham's account, pleasure also comes into trauma. After all, if trauma was as bad as it seems to be, how would it be possible for humans to keep reinforcing it?
In the extract below, Lucas regards the catastrophe beside Catherine :. He saw the woman cross the sky. He saw above her, above the smoke and the sky, a glittering horse made of stars. He saw Catherine's face, pained and inspired. She spoke his name. He knew that his heart had stopped. He wanted to say, I am large, I contain multitudes. I am in the grass under your feet. He made as if to speak but did not speak.
In the sky, the great celestial horse turned his enormous head. An unspeakable beauty announced itself. The emotional reaction of the crowd, absorbed by the tragic event, is also shared by the reader, making both evoke the figure of possible voyeurs. In a famous essay Susan Sontag wrote about one's attitude toward the pain of others:. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it […] or those who could learn from it.
The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. In fact, the pleasure of regarding suffering images was first studied by Aristotle in his seminal Poetics :. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience.
Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity : such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. Cunningham does not copy history to literature. On the contrary, he proposes a literary rewriting of history and a very critical view of the limits between both practices and fields.
They unfold the belated temporality of trauma, pointing out moments when the hidden reminiscences of the original accident emerge and are restaged. From this point of view, September 11 cannot be regarded either as a traumatic event or as an unprecedented case, contrary to the common belief among critics. Indeed, the consequences of the terrorist attacks are much more devastating than the event itself. Terrorism remains the echo from the past and a transitional moment which lays the grounds for the future, becoming again the origin for another moment in the future and so on.
Following my exposition, it is reasonable to argue that the novel discloses the threat and fantasies of insecurity and affections such as anxiety brought about by the original traumatic experience. In Specimen Days , the unknown enemy and the atmosphere of paranoia are depicted in a community increasingly based on surveillance systems and overtaken by machines.
In such a context, poetry is more and more disengaged with its literary purposes. The android Simon works for Dangerous Encounters, an illegal company that offers services for those who want to have violent crimes committed against themselves, such as robberies.
Taken in a broad perspective, this is a clear effect of the Industrial Revolution explored in the first novella, whose symptoms were thereafter exacerbated and restaged. Simon is the character who can speak Whitman's verses. Yet androids are neither robots nor humans. Because humanity has been violently affected by the industrial process of urban societies to the point of replacing humans' duties with machines and creating android beings, poetry is at a crossroads : if not humans, who is to speak or listen to poetry?
Is it ever to survive? While in Cunningham's account trauma was displaced from September 11, the terrorist attack being just a symptom of the first experience, in Lerner's book its very existence is questioned.
Nevertheless, terrorism turns out to be an opportunity to criticize the essence of literary debates raised after and the possibility of trauma is, at least, mocked, as I shall contend. Although novels such as The reluctant fundamentalist by Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid or Saturday by Englishman Ian McEwan give a transnational account, this seems to be the first time an American character is displaced in Europe.
In fact, he is tired of the frequently quoted poets like Lorca, cleverly used by Adam himself as a free pass to step into the circle of native intellectuals. The idolatry of these leftist poets — as if there were no other good poets ever — reveals how the idolaters' judgment is to a large extent attached to something outside poetry. Therefore, a poet will be continually acclaimed as long as he is considered a spokesman of the reality.
Even though such theme attracted many of his colleagues, he remains hugely ironic and critical about its premises. He does not believe in the widespread attitude of empowering poetry to affect History, as well as the other way around, that is, of empowering History to act directly upon literature. This is implied in the extract below, in which Adam ironically explains to a friend his 'literary' motivations :.
I was surprised to find myself inclined to defend a project I'd never clearly delineated, let alone ever planned to complete, as opposed to conceding its total vacuity. Art as a consequence of something else is implied in the view according to which artists have to promptly react to their historical moment and is a common belief in critical works that relate literature and history. More recently, it has been the basis of a large amount of studies after XXI century terrorism.
To regard a work of art as a 'response' to a historical event is, to some extent, the same as consider literature an effect of history, because 'response' is only possible when there is a question from which the former depends and derives. If there is to be a question, history is responsible for raising it, and literature for reacting to it, therefore, being determined by this very question.
Firstly, there is the feeling of emergence exalted by September Large-scale disruptive events are historically felt as crises demanding prompt public answers from politicians, citizens and, not less importantly, artists and authors. It happened in the aftermath of the Holocaust or World War I, for instance. As Keniston pointed out, there was an urge to represent and respond to the crisis due to the scale of such an event, and it had to be done within the public sphere of which literature is part.
Published ten years after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D. The disbelief in a literary response for a historical event is revealed through a number of events in the plot that attempt to be shocking or traumatic but failed to take place and so remain a mere virtuality. The fantasies of violence never become true, as if warning us to draw a line between art and life, as well as art and history.
Because he fails to live such experiences, he turns to make them up as a way of compensation. This is why he lies about his mother, telling people she is dead or seriously ill.
He also appropriates a friend's experience of witnessing a woman dying of drowning. They work as a call for readers to pay attention to simple events and to the simple experience of art, rather than looking for high idealizations. While waiting for the depiction of the terrorist attack, the reader ends up enjoying the mundane and daily events that happened during the character's journey.
This is why we are all taken aback by the deflationary and anti-climactic depiction of Adam who, having passed by the Atocha station at the moment of the bombings, just passed by the scene and prefers to go back home to read about it on the internet. It shows a skeptical attitude, as well as the power of media in offering second-handed accounts :. The article described the helicopters I could hear above me. Then, as if concluding this was an impossible task, I said I didn't know.
Yet Adam is implying there was no such thing as trauma — almost an obligation for an American in the XXI century, as well as for the Spanish society that carries the burden of the dictatorship. In any case, literature is not a response to it. This is why terrorist attacks and the question of trauma are displaced by all sorts of adventures lived by the characters during the novel.
If literature does not have the responsibility of depicting traumatic events, nor is more special for doing so, what follows is the importance given to simple fictional events and episodes. This position is made clear in Adam's critical attitude toward the debates aimed at gathering together writers and other intellectuals to discuss and propose a role of poetry in an age of terrorism.
Nevertheless, the author appropriates historical events including personal experiences in order to convert them into literary material. He focuses the interest of the novel not on depicting history, but on recreating it and criticizing the ready subordination of literature to history.
The strategy enables the author to develop a counter-discourse that raises questions about the role of literature at large : Leaving the Atocha Station suggests the failure of novels to mirror historical events and catastrophes and stresses the mundane concerns of literature. Moreover, it also points out the inadequacy of literature to respond to traumatic moments, since trauma tends to be used as false evidence for certain political causes rather than for literary purposes.
0コメント