Record traffic for Virtual Memories this month (and there’s still a few days left, plus it’s a short month)!
Now if only more of you would buy The Immensity of the Here and Now, that novel about 9.11 by Paul West that I published last fall.
Last week, I mentioned that I needed a translation from the Swedish for this review of Immensity. Well, Ken Schubert took care of it for me, and did a bang-up job. Here’s his translation:
“I’ve become an anxious person”
The art, film and music worlds responded quickly to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Literature was slower. Dan Jonsson has read three novels about two airplanes that changed the world.
Caption: Why did the world change? Was it all the suffering, the dead people? Or was it the resemblance between the events and a media production?
For once, it appears to have actually happened.
The events in New York on September 11, 2001 literally changed the world.
Maybe the question we should be asking ourselves is what really caused that change. Was it all the human suffering, the dead people? Or was it the resemblance between the events and a media production — images of the planes crashing into the buildings, the soundlessly collapsing towers, the ash-strewn surroundings and the austere romanticism of Ground Zero? The symbolic, clinical sharpness of the images painstakingly concealed the essence of the attack — the death of its victims.
Literary portrayals of major historical traumas are normally long in coming, but September 11 has provoked prompt counterattacks on all fronts. Last fall marked the release of Paul West’s The Immensity of the Here and Now, a painful excavation of the psychological devastation that the attacks left in their wake. Around the same time, Frenchman Frederic Beigbeder published Windows on the World, a controversial bestseller that attempts to recount the episode from the vantage point of the famed tower restaurants.
Common to the two novels is their focus on inner processes rather than the all-too-familiar course of events. As Beigbeder comments dryly at the beginning of his book, “You all know how it ends: everyone dies.” That foreknowledge also casts a dramatic shadow over Else Buschheuer’s diary novel www.elsebuschheuer.de, presumably the first piece of September 11 fiction when it came out in February 2002. Much of it was written, and even published, before the attacks in the form of a running Internet diary of what was to be an extended visit to New York.
The first two months are a long, tumultuous tour de force of the city’s merchandise fetishism and media mirages, executed with great linguistic zest and ironic distance.
Reading the book is like sitting with your seat belt clasped in one of those planes, more and more terrifying the closer you come. The September 8 entry is about a “cozy evening at home in front of the TV” and the heading for September 9 is “Tidbits.” Triviality waxes prophetic when she expresses her “great relief” on September 5 that the New York sky “could never fall down on my head. The buildings are so high. They hold everything up, I thought, and grew calm.”
The attacks appear midway through the book like a classic peripeteia, turning everything into its opposite. For a moment, the writing becomes agitated, emotional, confused, vulnerable. The people around her — parents, boyfriend, a daughter not previously mentioned — are unexpectedly visible. “I have become an anxious person,” she writes on September 13. “Before this I wasn’tafraid of anything, except that someone would get too close to me. Now I’m afraid of everything.” The fear is accompanied by a vague sense of guilt about the flippancy of her previous life, uncertainty as to whether what she has just gone through is reality or mere images on a TV screen, and the fact that the victims are somebody else.
Similar issues plague Beigbeder in Windows on the World. But while Buschheuer’s talents are in the realm of the documentary, Beigbeder’s are closer to the essay. His book interweaves the tale of a Texas real-estate broker and his two sons with autobiographical reflections. Although the terrorist attacks are the kernel of the book, the narrative branches out both thematically and psychologically.
Beigbeder writes with a mixture of gusto and earnestness that can be explosive. The protagonist tries to console his sons by describing the world as a carnival attraction with special effects by George Lucas. Beigbeder points out that the lapse between collision and collapse is about as long “as a normal Hollywood movie.” He immediately follows that up with a well-aimed dig at his own “dandyism” — in other words, the author as perpetrator, fiction as a sinister moral vacuum. While aware of the risk that he will be regarded as speculative, Beigbeder argues that even a traumatic event of this magnitude deserves retelling in fictional form: “You have to write that which is forbidden” — i.e., what can’t be written. If that’s true, The Immensity of the Here and Now is the closest you can get to such a novel.
Three years after the terrorist attacks, Shrop and Quent, who have been friends since the Second World War, struggle with their phantom pains. Shrop is suffering from extensive memory loss, which Quent — a psychoanalyst — tries to cure.
Memory loss — West avails himself of a popular contemporary metaphor — becomes a composite symbol for innumerable smaller deprivations: a sense of reality, courage to live, trust among human beings, connectedness, comprehensibility, historical understanding and existential meaning.
With its Joycean flow of words, The Immensity of the Here and Now can either intoxicate you or make you give up in exhaustion. Given the abruptly shifting associations between the trivial and the momentous, the book often resembles a kind of collective psychoanalysis. Other times it is more like a melancholy dream, absurd and linguistically absorbed — a Finnegans Wake for a fragmented era. Shrop sees himself as fumbling for a pillar to lean on in a world that has spun out of control — as if the terrorist attacks were intentionally carried out “to devastate consciousness.”
His conclusion is that “something had happened that was nothing.” To encounter that “nothing” is to be at the juncture where language stops functioning. And to write in and around that juncture is — if I understand West and Beigbeder correctly — the author’s sole responsibility.
Dan Jonsson, kultur@dn.se