800 The American Century: Literature since 1945this novel, “than a habit, a facet” of the condition of young Arab-Americans like
Ahmad: men and women who constitute “an underclass, alien in a nation that
persists in thinking of itself as light-skinned, English-speaking, and Christian.”
Ahmad, in short, is “an outsider among outsiders,” dwelling in an “underworld” that
middle America chooses not only not to value but not even to see. To that extent, he
is a familiar, iconic figure in American literature. The problem is that in Terrorist the
portrait of this figure lacks both dramatic immediacy and narrative mediation.
There is neither the degree of imaginative involvement nor the rhetorical framing,
the explanation of motive to be found in classic portraits of the American outsider,
from Ahab through Jay Gatsby to Bigger Thomas or even Holden Caulfield. So
Ahmad remains an outsider, not merely to those around him but also to the reader;
he remains a stranger to us, and unknown.
The determining feature of trauma is that it is unsayable. So perhaps the way to
tell a story that cannot be told is to tell it aslant. This is the strategy of those fictions
that have engaged with some degree of success with 9/11 and its consequences,
among them The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah
Eisenberg, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid (1971–),
Netherland (2008) by Joseph O’Neill (1964–), and The Garden of Last Days (2008) by
Andre Dubus III (1959–). What these books have in common may, on the surface,
be very little. What they share below that surface, however, is the impulse to approach
the contemporary crisis by circuitous means, by stealth. In The Road the approach is
a fundamentally symbolic one. On the surface, The Road describes the journey of
two people, a father and son, “moving south” across a bleak, devastated and sparsely
populated landscape because, as the father realizes, “There’d be no surviving another
winter here” where they begin their long trek. The structure of the narrative, a
continuous series of discrete paragraphs undivided into chapters or sections, clearly
repeats the rhythm of the journey, a series of short stages moving toward something
like a destination. The “event” that has reduced the United States – and, it is intimated,
the rest of the world – to a deathly state remains resolutely unexplained, just as
father, son, and nearly all of the other characters remain unnamed. This might be
the world after a nuclear holocaust. Or it might not be; some other dread event
might have turned the world to dust. The point is that McCarthy both says and
remains silent. The unnameable remains unnamed, except in its human consequences.
McCarthy translates trauma into a narrative memory that captures, with the
exactitude and elusiveness of symbolism, what it might be like to live after the fall.
The strategies deployed here for dealing with the ghosts that haunt the twenty-first
century, particularly in the West and especially in America, may not be startlingly
new. They are, after all, the ancient strategies of myth and fable. But McCarthy has
reworked those strategies to address contemporary pain, offering a realistic measure
of its extraordinary scope, the sense of apocalypse that now seems to haunt the West
and, in doing so, neither to minimize that pain nor surrender to it.
The narrative strategies at work in Twilight of the Superheroes are quite different,
consisting as the book does of a series of lucidly disjunctive short stories. They are,
however, equally effective. The title story – and the most remarkable one in theGGray_c05.indd 800ray_c 05 .indd 800 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM