796 The American Century: Literature since 1945After the event, we learn, Joyce engages in casual liaisons. “They called it terror sex.
Everyone needed something new, some release or payback or just acknowledgment
that their lives had changed.”
Sex, love, the public and the private – and art and economics. Everything has
changed, according to those writers who have offered preliminary testimony to 9/11
and its aftermath, from the material fabric of our lives to our terms of consciousness.
For Wendell Berry, the changes press down on our need to shake off the illusions of
late capitalism. “The time will soon come,” he writes at the beginning of In the
Presence of Fear (2001), “when we will not be able to remember the horrors of
September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and
economic optimism that ended that day.” “This optimism,” he goes on, “rested on
the proposition that we were living in a ‘new world order’ and a ‘new economy’ that
would ‘grow’ on and on.” For Berry, trauma has led to intellectual clarity. Americans,
and their allies, have a choice generated by a dreadful historical eruption. They can,
on the one hand, continue to promote a global economic system of uncontrolled
“free trade” between corporations, dependent on “long and highly vulnerable lines
of communication and supply,” an arrangement that will now have to be protected
“by a hugely expensive police-force ... world-wide.” Alternatively, they can try to
develop “a decentralized world economy” that would aim at providing for every
nation and region “a local self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods.” Berry’s
alternatives are etched out with force and clarity here, as in all his work. Because he
chose the distance offered by reasonably dispassionate (if highly committed)
economic and social analysis in In the Presence of Fear, he achieved an unusual
transparency of vision and statement. This has come at a cost; there is not the
immersion, the intimacy of experience that comes from literary testimony. But what
that buys is the lucidity of witness. There is little sense here of what it is humanly like
to encounter trauma, exhilarating or otherwise. Equally, though, there is none of the
confusion of feeling, the groping after a language with which to speak the unspeakable
that sometimes characterizes the writing devoted to the new forms of terror.
Recognition, or at least the belief that the old mindset has been destroyed or seriously
challenged, is widespread in recent literature. Some writers, however, are still
struggling to get the fictional measure of the new worldview.
What the reader is occasionally left with, in fact, in writing after the fall is symptom
rather than diagnosis, the registering that something traumatic has happened that is
perhaps too dreadful for words, unsusceptible as yet to understanding. Falling Man
is beautifully structured, playing with images announced by the title that are no less
resonant for being obvious. But the structure is too clearly foregrounded, the style
excessively mannered; and the characters fall into postures of survival after 9/11 that
are too familiar to invite much more than a gesture of recognition from the reader.
One character, for instance, falls back on the game of poker as his refuge because
while playing only “the game mattered, the stacking of chips, the eye count, the play
and dance of hand and eye.” The trouble is, in this account of a gambler seeking
shelter from the storm in the numbness of cardplay, the prose is similarly, sympto-
matically numb. Elsewhere, another character in Falling Man turns to the rituals ofGGray_c05.indd 796ray_c 05 .indd 796 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM