After the Fact: Mourning, Melancholy, and Nachträglichkeit in Novels of 9/11

After the Fact: Mourning, Melancholy, and "Nachträglichkeit" in Novels of 9/11Author(s): Beverly HavilandSource: Amerikastudien / American Studies, Vol. 55, No. 3, Trauma's Continuum—September11th Reconsidered (2010), pp. 429-449Published by: Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbhStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41158510 .

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After the Fact: Mourning, Melancholy, and Nachträglichkeit in Novels of 9/11

Beverly Haviland1

ABSTRACT

This essay about two 9/11 novels argues that the possibilities of mourning- in Jonathan Saf- ran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)- or melancholia- in Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007)- are opened or foreclosed by the author's deployment of a temporal framework that spans generations so as to allow for a period of latency before a new meaning can be made. The temporal deferral of meaning defines Nachträglichkeit, and Freud's linking of this notion to the biphasic nature of human sexuality indicates why the transgenerational narrative is an effective figuration of the transformation of traumatic effects and affects. The relations between the narrator and the characters in these two novels represent opposing possibilities of a transformative asymmetrical reciprocity, as in a successful analytic transference, or relations of domination and thwarted mutuality that perpetuate the compulsive repetitions of trauma. Foer's strategic use of multiple narrators and multiple generations plays out an alternative to the inevitable transmission of traumatic effects across generations by showing how a complex rearrangement of the roles that characters play for each other allows the work of mourning to progress.

In the rich and varied field of trauma studies, much attention has been devoted to the phenomenon of the transmission of trauma across generations. Most of the historical, sociological, psychological, and psychoanalytic work on this topic has focused on the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants, and there have been lively disputes not only about the reality of the phenomenon but about the possible effects of propagating such claims, as they may be seen as signs of posthumous success for the Nazis. For the survivors and their descendants who have recovered from the traumatic losses, events, and dislocations of the Holocaust, models have been proposed regarding what makes that transformation possible, models that have general relevance to the study of trauma and recovery (Auer- hahn and Laub, Felsen, Herman, Mazor et al.).2 Narrative plays an important role in these models.

First-person testimony has occupied a privileged position among narrative forms for historical and psychological reasons because it establishes rhetorically the continuity of the experiencing subject, even if the construction of the narra-

1 My thanks to readers who helped me refine and clarify this essay: Paul B. Armstrong, Rita Hurwitz, Jenny Weissbourd, and the editors of this special volume.

1 The field of trauma studies is so vast that my references are merely pointers to texts that have been useful to me for this essay, as it is not my purpose here to present a comprehensive summary of the literature.



430 Beverly Haviland

tive still shows signs of traumatic discontinuities. This continuity of the speaking subject is valued as a counter to the discontinuity and rupture that characterize his or her traumatic experience: it is a sign of survival, even if that speaking is fragmented and comes long after the fact. The importance of this belatedness in understanding the peculiar temporal structure of traumatic memory- that the experience may not be comprehended at the time of its occurrence but can only later be re-cognized and transformed into a system of signification- has been explored extensively in the register of individual experience, both historical and literary, as well as in the register of the transgenerational transmission of traumatic effects (Caruth, Felman and Laub, Fresco, Hartman, Mitchell).

However, the possible therapeutic effect of belatedness has received less attention (Bryant-Davis, Danieli). The biphasic temporality of traumatic memory that Sigmund Freud designates as Nachträglichkeit is generally understood in the context of the individual's transformation of a (relative) void into a (relative) full- ness of meaning, but it might also be taken as descriptive of the transference of possibilities of meaning developing across generations. One way to explore this structure of belated meaning-making is to consider the way that novels can structure multiple temporalities by representing different generations. In other words, one of the resources offered by the novel as a genre to the study of trauma is its capacity to represent the effects of a long passage of time on multiple subject positions. Thus the novel can address this issue of the belated effects of trauma, be they malignant or beneficent, in ways that differ from those of first-person testimony or even the collection and sequencing of first-person testimonies because of the control that the novelist has in structuring the relation of the temporalities and subjectivities.

For some scholars writing on trauma such as Kali Tal, fictiveness produces a distortion that interferes with a proper understanding of the experience. Yet, as argued in recent works by Laurie Vickroy and Anne Whitehead on trauma in the novel as well as E. Ann Kaplan's and Janet Walker's works on trauma in cinema, this claim ignores the possibility that representation is always already a vexed issue.3 The various forms of dissociation, repression or fragmentation of memory and expression that are characteristic effects (although not the only ones) produced by traumatic experience are, therefore, not necessarily the im- pediments to the novelist that they might be to a historian, at least to a historian committed to writing in the mode of realistic narrative that still dominates the profession (cf. LaCapra, White). The novelist, even the realist in pursuit of 'truth,' has always taken liberties in the construction of a narrative.4 That many of the most acclaimed texts dealing with trauma use experimental strategies shows the

3 A forthcoming volume, After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narra- tive, edited by Lothe, Suleiman, and Phelan, focuses specifically on the ways in which the representation of trauma troubles narrative conventions and the analysis of narrative reveals aspects of testimony that enrich our understanding of its complexity. 4 Dissociation as a symptom has received a disproportionate amount ot attention as a traumatic effect in literary studies, perhaps because of Caruth's reliance on Derrida as a guarantor of the aporia of language. For a more comprehensive and nuanced discussion of the various symptoms of trauma, see Auerhahn and Laub. It is beyond the scope of this essay to sort out the



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degree to which the conventions of realistic writing are in the service of a certain normative conception of experience, particularly with respect to the representation of integrated subjectivity and chronological time. The epistemological value of these literary techniques has been demonstrated in novels such as Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987), Maus by Art Spiegelman (1986), and Corregidora by Gayl Jones (1975), all of which focus on the issue of the transgenerational transmission of trauma.

Moreover, representation is not the only register in which the novelist works. There are any number of different rhetorical strategies to stage what cannot be said or known by the characters and yet, nevertheless, is experienced by the reader. That is, the novelist can engage the reader through his or her control of the forms of the narrative by, for example, giving the reader knowledge that remains unconscious (or unknown in some other way) to the characters themselves. A well-known use of this strategy would be dramatic irony, in which the reader knows the fate that awaits a character; less conspicuous examples would be the use of an unreliable narrator or the rupture of chronology to create different experiences of sequence and repetition for the reader. The "empathie unsettlement" that Dominick LaCapra urges the historian of trauma to cultivate as a modus operandi is assumed by the reader of a fiction to be the liability of the aesthetic contract, taken at one's own risk (41). Developing points made by LaCapra, Cathy Caruth, and Wolfgang Iser, Vickroy points out that fiction can engage the reader in experiences of uncertainty and ambiguity similar to those of the victim of a traumatic experience through its manipulation of such devices as the use of multiple voices and points of view, disrupted chronology, and distorted processes of symbolization (8, 11, 21, 27). Aristotle helped us to understand the potentially therapeutic effects of witnessing unsettling experiences of danger and pleasure when tragedy is a ritualized, and therefore public and communal, performance. The private act of reading a novel can offer us, I want to suggest in this essay, a particular way for the reader to understand how the deferral of meaning across generations might be therapeutic, not for the later but for the earlier generation. The reader's own deferred understanding of how the experiences of trauma and healing are represented and staged rhetorically might also be, if not therapeutic, at least conducive to empathy by means of identification with the character's transformed understanding of his or her experience.

In order to explore this problem of how the staging of various temporalities and multiple subjectivities represented in fiction suggests immediate and deferred responses to traumatic experiences, I want to compare two novels that focus on the terrorist attacks of September 11 in New York, namely, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007). These novels will be analyzed to show how their narrative strategies dispose the characters either toward mourning, in which the traumatic loss is worked through; or toward melancholy, in which the loss is acted out and endlessly repeated. Comparing the formal choices of the novelists suggests that a narrative

relation between repression and dissociation in traumatic experience. It will have to suffice here to say that they both create gaps in consciousness.




can stage these possibilities in a variety of different registers of representation and construction. It is perhaps understandable that there are many more examples of what I am calling the 'novel of melancholy' than that of the 'novel of mourning' at this historical moment because the meaning of 9/11 is not yet informed by much retrospective vision. Perhaps it is too soon for the transformative capacities of Nachträglichkeit to be in play: There must, after all, be a period of latency before that change of meaning can take place. There is, however, an interesting way to produce this retrospective by creating a much more complicated temporal structure than that typically used by the novel of melancholy.

The novel of melancholy as I am defining it here takes as its focus the familiar story of a heterosexual couple whose relationship fails to provide solace in the aftermath of a traumatic loss. What is remarkable about all of these novels of melancholy (DeLillo, Mclnerney, Schulman, Tristram) is that they have adopted the same kind of temporal framework for their narratives, all of which focus on these characters' stories in the time more or less immediately following 9/11 (1 day to 3 years).5 More significantly, for reasons I will explain in my analysis of DeLillo's Falling Man, they all construct point of view as alternating primarily between the two members of the couple and an omniscient narrator. The circumscription of the temporal framework and the representation of subjectivities that are negotiat- ing relationships governed either by mutuality or domination seem to produce a narrative of compulsive repetition that is the hallmark of trauma.

On the other hand, my single example of a 9/11 novel that stages and repre- sents working through mourning is transgenerational and presents three distinct first-person narrators. I have qualms about basing so much on a single example, but I cannot invent books that do not exist to fill out my sample, and the paucity of examples may reflect the very difficulty of making the transition from melancholy to mourning. It is for this reason that Foer's book in particular merits our close attention as a very rare example of the processes of mourning represented in a complex work of fiction in ways that non-fiction guides to grieving cannot approximate. Why this combination of structural features allows for the possibility of mourning need not be argued a priori, nor am I claiming that such choices necessarily produce a novel of mourning, although, as Vickroy also notes, the use of multiple viewpoints seems to be particularly useful for the representation of traumatic experience (27). I will offer a reading framed by psychoanalytic notions of the processes of deferred action and transference to understand the working through of traumatic loss in this novel. The multiple narrators from different generations provide delayed and displaced asymmetrical opportunities for regeneration by means of complex acts of identification.

The benefit of these evolving relationships comes by way of a character finding him- or herself involved in the narrative of another character, much as the analyst finds him- or herself involved in the transference of the analysand. In other words, it may be that it is not only through telling one's own story- which is what the tes-

5 Schulman's novel A Day at the Beach breaks this pattern to some degree because it re- counts two earlier traumatic losses of the heroine, but it remains within one generation and looks to the heterosexual dyad as a relationship within which healing is to be sought.



After the Fact 433

timony model assumes- that one can be reintegrated into the sequential flow of time and become able to make distinctions between past and present. This regeneration of meaning-making may also come about by finding oneself in a relationship with another person in which his or her past and present are strands of the narrative which the two people are telling and living together. This displacement of authorship, and thus authority, may be the narrative analogue to the temporal belatedness that characterizes Nachträglichkeit and the asymmetrical reciprocity that characterizes the play of transference and countertransference. This change in the meaning of one's life story may come about in response to various kinds of personal relationships. In analysis and therapy, it is the explicit purpose of the asymmetrical dyadic relationship to work through material for the sake of the patient, although the analyst/therapist may be transformed in the process as well. This is a difference of degree rather than of kind.

The temporal deferral of meaning defines Nachträglichkeit, and Freud's linking of this notion of deferral to the biphasic nature of human sexuality might indi- cate why the transgenerational narrative is an effective figuration of the revision of the memory of the event in association with new experience. To be clear, I am not claiming that having grandchildren is the remedy to traumatic experiences or that marriage need be the arena of melancholy. Rather, I am interested in how these temporal structures deployed in novels suggest different possibilities of response to and resolution of traumatic loss. What kinds of relationships, subjective and temporal, are figured in these novels in ways that suggest dispositions toward mourning or melancholy? This is to look at the issue from a different perspective than that which focuses only on the individual character's relationships to lost objects. The narrative forms are these problems writ large or, rather, in a different register. I will consider these novels from both perspectives.

The subject-object relationships that allow mourning to be worked through are quite different from those that foster melancholy. This is what Freud explains in "Mourning and Melancholia" when he describes the mourner as being able to accept (eventually) the loss of a beloved object by cathecting to a different object. He contrasts this shift in cathexis with the melancholic's identification of the lost object with his or her ego. In the latter case, the inevitable ambivalence that informed the relation to the object is the origin of the self-deprecation that is the distinctive mode of melancholic expression (246). These self-reproaches are understandable as the expressions of hostility against the now-lost object, but the hostility is now turned inward against the ego (248). These two psychic states of mourning and melancholy thus arise from very different configurations of subjectivity, and what is interesting here is to see what kind of narrative shape those relations of subject and lost object take, not primarily in the representation of characters confronted with traumatic loss but in the construction of the subject-object relations of narrator and character. I will begin with the novel of mourning, which is more complicated as a narrative but easier to describe theo- retically, perhaps because mourning is, as Freud says, a more "normal affect" than melancholia (243).




I.

As in his debut novel Everything is Illuminated (2002), Foer has created a complex narrative structure in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to stage the problem of trauma in multiple dimensions. In his first novel, he developed stories in the past and present that are related by blood, as it were. The present narrator, named Jonathan Safran Foer, is descended from the narrator of the past story, which is, of course, biologically possible. What is not possible is that JSF the narrator knows what he is able to tell. His narration is impossible not because of this replication of the name but because JSF the narrator has come on a quest to the Ukraine to find out about his grandfather's life and that of all the generations in the Jewish shtetl of Trachimbrod before him, so he cannot possibly know everything that he is telling even though he finds out some of his grandfather's story: He is clearly making a lot of it up. The novel is set up as a kind of epistemological Möbius strip around which the reader is nevertheless driven by the hero's need to know. Though eventually receiving an answer, it is not the answer to his question, but rather to one asked by his Ukrainian Doppelgänger, the young tour guide desperate to learn idiomatic English and to whose epistles to JSF the reader is subjected throughout the text. After JSF's quest has been stymied, the guide's grandfather, who has never spoken about his wartime experiences, confesses to the fatal betrayal of a Jewish friend, a confession that allows him to take his life "complete with happiness," as he writes in his suicide note (276).

The novel is much more complex than this summary suggests, but it is useful for my analysis of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to see that there are some concerns and narrative strategies common to Foer's two novels. Both are driven by a quest; both have an interpolation of narratives of traumas from different pe- riods in time; both have an answer given to a question posed across generations; and both have multiple narrators, some of whom exist only through their writing rather than through that mysterious phenomenon (which readers of the novel usually overlook) in which first-person narration somehow appears as writing on the page for the reader even if the character is not writing it down. Foer is very interested in the materiality of writing because it can be manipulated in obvious ways to display, peacock-like, its variety of possible meanings, a point to which I will return later in this essay when I consider the materiality of the falling body.

One of the consequential changes that Foer makes in his second novel is, however, in choosing the age of one of his narrators. Rather than placing his own seemingly undisguised reflection in a narrator who shares his name, age, nation- ality, language, etc., he creates a child narrator who is eight years old in 2003, the time of his narrative. One of the advantages Foer gains immediately from this choice is that he can internalize all of the fantasy, magic realism, and meshugas, which made the saga of Trachimbrod rich and wonderful, if perhaps sometimes over-the-top. The slippery imagination of a child, whose perspective the reader can recognize as both limited and perceptive, is already a place of multiple realities, and Foer's use of certain narrative techniques of irony includes the reader in the discovery of those multiple realities. The mind of a precocious child is not virgin territory for the novel, but the experiences of which this one must make



After the Fact 435

sense are rather more horrific than the Sturm und Drang of middle-class phoni- ness (pace Holden Caulfield). A closer soul mate, with whom he shares not only a first name but also a preference for percussion instruments, is Günter Grass's Oskar Matzerath. In ordinary circumstances, the predilection of Foer's Oskar for invention might have made him a player at school science fairs. When his father dies in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, his over-active imagination becomes both a torture chamber and a survival kit. Magic realism internalized becomes the magical thinking that characterizes both childhood and the denial of unbearable loss, as Joan Didion has so eloquently shown in her memoir of sudden widowhood, The Year of Magical Thinking.

The son on a quest for his father is a time-honored topos, even if the search is not literal in this case. Oskar knows that his father is dead, but what he wants to know is how his father died so that he can stop inventing horrible possibilities of what his father's last moments might have been. In September 2002, he finds a key in an envelope with the word "Black" written in red ink in a vase hidden in his father's closet. Since he has not been able to figure out whether one of the falling bodies shown on a Portuguese website is that of his father because the image dis- solves into pixels before he can focus it clearly enough, he shifts his need to know how his father died from the elusive image to the (phallic) key: finding the lock it fits will surely reveal at least something that was previously unknown about his father. This displacement of his anxiety from something that is uncontrollable to a something that he can more or less control is potentially more productive than the transference going on with his therapist who asks him: "Do you think that any good can come from your father's death?" Oskar narrates his response:

I kicked over the chair, threw his papers across the floor, and hollered, "No! Of course not, you fucking asshole!" That was what I wanted to do. Instead I just shrugged my shoulders. (203)

The reader already knows that this gesture is the one of his father's that Oskar loved best, so that however much his silence might mystify his impatient shrink, the reader can understand it as an act of identification- one for which his father did not, of course, need to be dead.

When a visit to the locksmith clarifies the impossibility of finding the lock the key fits, even when one knows that this kind of key fits a safe deposit box, Oscar turns to his other piece of evidence. He starts his quest in earnest once a helpful saleswoman in an art supply store (one of his many helpers) suggests that "Black" is a family name because when people test pens, they tend to write the name of the color of the ink in which they are writing. Multi-colored pages verifying her claim suddenly appear in the book that the reader is holding as Oskar looks at the sample pads next to the colored pens (45-49). The reader can see for herself that this is true: We are sharing identical reading experiences in real time. She can also discover for herself what Oskar does on the third page and at the same moment, namely, the name of his father, Thomas Schell, a name so unusual that it must be a sign that his father had been there. Eureka!

Except that he had not been there at all. The reader does not find out until much later that it was not Oskar's father but his grandfather who wrote his name




in various media throughout the art store. Oskar never finds this out within the temporal frame of the novel. This is one sequence in which an identification of sensory and epistemological experience (here between the reader and Oskar) at one moment can become a mismatch at another. This alternation of identification and differentiation is characteristic of the unfolding of the multi-dimensional plot, and it foregrounds the polysemy of signs by making the doubling of the name a mistake that nonetheless contributes to the success of Oskar's quest. These epistemological asymmetries and temporal gaps are structurally crucial to Foer's staging of the possibilities of mourning, as we shall see, because they keep in play both the difference of subjectivities and their identifications.

There is a great deal of cleverness in Foer's inclusion of various kinds of images like that of the writing pad in the text: There are photographs of keys and locks and turtles and Hamlet and all kinds of things that play a role in Oskar's story. Foer also experiments with typography, sometimes having only one word on a page and once having the lines of type increasingly overlap so that the page becomes completely illegible and almost black. Although the precedent for this kind of playfulness already appears in the black and marbleized pages of Tris- tram Shandy, Foer's experiments (of which there are portents in the typography of Everything is Illuminated) figure for the reader in a variety of ways at different times. These are some of the ways that meaning is made for the reader by the form of the novel rather than by its representations. These experiments with form have different meanings. For example, sometimes the identification of the reading experiences (as with the doodle pad) disrupts the connection and boundary between the materiality of the signifier and the conceptual functions of the signified that we, as readers, usually take for granted. The identification of character and reader is made to work by this technique in a more literal register than is usual, such as when a reader says that she identifies with Isabel Archer or Julien Sorrel. Foer's disruptions are more than just tricks of the trade to jar the reader into awareness of the fictionality of the text, however, because another kind of identification we as readers share with Oskar is that we (in 2010) are all people who did experience the historical event of 9/11 and its aftermath. Of course, our individual historical experiences are not the same, but we share this experience in a way that the Battle of Waterloo cannot be shared when we identify with Stendhal's characters. Although some of Foer's literary experiments can stage the gaps and repetitions of trauma time on a structural level for the reader by their disruptions of narrative conventions, others- such as this simultaneous experience of the sensory perception of seeing the images of writing on the page- provide a ground for identification and empathy.

Within the framework of representation, the inability of Oskar to say anything when the art store saleswoman writes in one color the name of another ("purple," written in green [63]) is a micro instance of the disjuncture of sensory experience and signification or symbolization that characterizes the speechlessness of traumatic memory. It is one of only two times in the text when Oskar is unable to speak; the other is when his father's last call from the burning tower came through the answering machine as an amplified voice and he was unable to respond. After having heard the four messages on the answering machine in which his father



After the Fact 437

tries to be reassuring against a background of screams and breaking glass, Oskar misses the last chance he would ever have to speak with his adored father, the one who could make his "brain quiet" so that he "didn't have to invent a thing" (12).

Eleven times his father asks: "Are you there?" Overwhelmed by this demand for a response, Oskar is helpless; his response-ability is nil.6 He does not understand what is happening and he cannot act. But he knows immediately after the line goes dead that something horrible has happened. He immediately encrypts the answering machine by hiding it in his closet, preserving the voice of his father, and buying a replica so that his mother will never know what happened: "That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into" (71). That cryptic secret plays the role, along the lines suggested by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, of ex- cluding from introjection the lost object (his dead father)- a process that describes successful mourning- and instead incorporating the lost object as fantasmatic and magical. It is this incorporation that drives Oskar's quest.

The hidden messages are replayed by Oskar both in imagination and, on special occasions in reality, to compulsively repeat the experience of a loss he cannot yet transform. His grief is compounded by his guilt, for not only has he been abandoned (however involuntarily) by his father, but he has failed to meet his father's desire for contact with him at the moment of his death. Later, all but the last message will be played for the character (his grandfather) who will be able to help him perform another kind of burial of his father. Still much later in the novel, in the climactic anti-climax of the quest in which the secret is finally spoken, he tells another helper about the very last message (301). But this is only possible when his conscious quest for the lock that fits his key has come to a dead end, and he must give it up. Until then, he marches on, a melancholic little boy wearing very "heavy boots," as he tells the reader over and over again. The force of gravity pulls on his body, as it did on those who fell or jumped from the towers.

Working his way through the New York telephone book's listing of people with the surname Black takes him on as random a picaresque journey through the five boroughs as the alphabet can provide. This motley cast of characters gives Foer abundant opportunities to 'invent' within a framework of compulsory repetition-everyone is named Black- even as the reader might fret about an eight- year-old armed only with a cell phone, the mysterious key (hung albatross-style around his neck), and a tambourine to shake to remind Oskar that he is himself even in strange territories (and not that tin-drum kid) wandering through all the boroughs of New York. Even after a particular old Mr. Black becomes Oskar's faithful sidekick for much of the journey, the reader remains anxious and unaware until very late in the narrative, when Oskar himself figures out that his mother, who also has access to the telephone directory, had prepared all those New York Blacks for her son's arrival by calling them. No wonder they knew his name or had cookies ready!

6 I borrow this hyphenization from Oliver, whose psychoanalytically-based theory of subjectivity as constituted by our response-ability to others and our responsibility for others as well as her proposal that forgiveness is an alternative to alienation as a model for social relations informs my analysis of these novels.




Although Oskar provides the novel's dominant narrative, the other two narrators of the novel's other main stories frame and transform Oskar's story for the reader. The two other narrators are Oskar's grandparents, both of whom survived the firebombing of Dresden. These narratives augment and amplify for the reader the possible meanings of Oskar's attempt to mourn his loss rather than be mired forever in melancholy. Although he suffers from many symptoms of traumatic experience such as his fear of being stuck in an elevator should another plane fly into a building, his fantasmatic quest, nevertheless, engages him in an objective world. However, his quest for a substitute object, which is governed by métonymie displacements, is structurally different from that of the reader. The proliferation of associations provided by these other narratives allows the reader to metaphori- cally connect Oskar's loss and the guilt of failing to respond to his father's call to other people's similar experiences of great losses and failures. The reader and the hero are both involved in complex structurings of the possibilities of loss and regeneration, but the structurings are not the same. Unlike Oskar, we have access to all three narratives and are learning things that he will never know about his grandparents and their experiences in Dresden.

The business of comparing catastrophes and traumas is a very tricky one, and yet it seems to be crucial for Foer in both of his novels. Here is where the structural choice that he makes in framing the comparison seems important to understand insofar as it figures his understanding of the possibilities of healing. The rhetorical analysis of metaphor and metonymy (along the lines suggested by Roman Ja- kobson) helps us as readers to see this structure (Jakobson and Halle 69-96).

In the metaphoric comparison of two unlike terms, it is necessary to find similarity, and this is where comparisons of events such as the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide often come to grief. When Foer chooses to connect the attacks of 9/11 with the firebombing of Dresden, he does so not by insisting on their similarity within the frame of the representation (and thus having to address their many differences) but by connecting them metonymically through the transgenerational experiences of the Schell family. What is the effect over time of the catastrophes of Dresden on particular characters who find themselves suffering the terrible consequences of the attacks of 9/11? There is no need to claim a causal connection between the events or an essential similarity. The author can invent a continuum that is consequential but which stages the deferred action of Nach- träglichkeit rather than claiming any simple form of linear determinism.

This framing also allows the reader to see how and, perhaps, why the same event has been traumatic for one person and not for another (on a paradigmatic axis) as well as how the effects of trauma can move across generations (syntag- matically) in therapeutic as well as malignant ways.

Oskar's grandparents both lost their homes and families in the firebombing of Dresden. They also both lost the person they loved the most: Anna. Anna was the sister of Oskar's grandmother and the only beloved of Thomas Schell, his grandfather. She died carrying his unborn child. Thomas and the sister marry several years later in New York, but Thomas has already lost the ability to speak, a psychosomatic symptom that recalls Freud's first hysterical patients more read- ily than gaps of dissociated memory that are now considered by theorists such



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as Caruth and Bessel A. van der Kolk to be the most characteristic symptoms of traumatic experience. His narration is created through three forms of writing: his letters to the child who becomes Oskar's father; the notebooks he carries around so that he can converse, after a fashion, with people; and the tattoos "Yes" and "No" on his left and right palms, respectively.

He writes his child letters because he left his wife (Oskar's grandmother) when she became pregnant. By conceiving a child, she had broken the first rule of their marriage, a rule that he alone had made. To have a child would be a sign that he is alive, and as he feels it, his life ended when Anna and his first child died. To have another child would be to abandon them again:

it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her [Oskar's grandmother] [. . .] I would have spent that life among the living [...]. I know I was about to destroy what she'd been able to rebuild, but I had only one life. (133)

Nevertheless, he writes letters to his unborn and then to his born child, letters he never mails except for one: "I'll never be your father, and you will always be my child" (135). This writing from a father who believes himself already dead finds its proper destination only when he and Oskar dig up the empty coffin of Oskar's father/Thomas's son and fill it with the unsent, unread letters: "I needed to get them to you" (274).

This deferral of the arrival of the letters to their addressee stages the belated arrival of meaning to the experience of shock or fright that curtails the making of meaning and lays the groundwork for traumatic symptoms. He can fill this gap, connecting the experience of loss and its symbolization, however, only because Oskar's need provides him with the occasion. He becomes a player in Oskar's narrative. Having had the idea to dig up the coffin, Oskar did not know what to do next. Grandpa offers a solution that Oskar does not understand at the time (because he does not yet know that this man is his grandfather) but that keeps the quest moving. Grandpa does not step into his son's place and act as father to Oskar; he responds to the need of the boy to do something to keep his story moving forward so that he won't get stuck, as Grandpa has been for decades. The possibility of something happening next, and thus something new happening, is a necessary antidote to the monotonous repetition of melancholy (cf. Church and Haviland). Keeping things moving is what matters for Oskar; for the reader, who has read the letters now being buried, there is the sense that it is meet and right that these letters have finally arrived, even that the word takes the place of the flesh that is but dust somewhere around Manhattan. But the quests and needs of readers and characters are different here, as they are elsewhere in the novel.

Grandpa's life has skipped a generation, but he is able now, by virtue of playing a role in Oskar's story, to begin participating again in the temporal sequence from which he had absented himself, as in a wilderness, for forty years. It had not been until he saw in a German newspaper the death notice of his son, who shared his name, that he realizes that he himself is still alive: "my first thought was that I had died." Forsaking his posthumous perspective, he reads on to learn of his new identity in the sequence of generations: "'He leaves behind a wife and son,' I




thought, my son, I thought my grandson, I thought and thought and thought, and then I stopped thinking. . ." His assumption of his role as grandfather comes belatedly, not at the moment of its physical inception (Oskar's birth) but after the fact, when it is called forth by the gap in Oskar's narrative that needs to be filled now that his father is lost. Here, Nachträglichkeit governs the deferred connection of experience and meaning through the role one plays in another's story rather than by telling one's own story. He is regenerated as a grandfather, although he was dead as a father and thus cannot mourn his dead son. He returns to Manhattan and declares the purpose of his visit- whose revision is made visible to the reader via one of the novel's repeatedly used typographical strategies- to the passport control: "To mourn try to live" (273).

This shifting of subject and object positions is figured by the representation of each character both as a first-person narrator telling his own story and as a character in the other's first-person narrative. The dynamic transferences of these subject-object relations propose a world in which a subject may lose an object in one life story, but if found later as an object in another subject's story, that loss can be mourned by means of a new identification by the subject rather than being incorporated. Thomas Senior can identify with Oskar's loss of his father because of his own loss of his children, and that identification changes the meaning of Thomas Senior's loss, particularly because they are mourning the same person. It is significant, in light of this complex interplay (for reasons that will become clearer in my later comparison with the novel of melancholy) that each narrator has its own characteristic, distinctive voice (stylistically and typographically) so that there can be no mistaking one for the other. This play of subject-object relations within defined boundaries is conducive to working through traumatic loss and completing the process of mourning, be it in the transference of a clinical setting or in other interpersonal relations.

Traumatic symptoms can be passed through the generations in various ways, but they can apparently also be transformed when the subject becomes a found object for another subject at some later time. Although much clinical evidence- including a recent study of the preschoolers who witnessed the attacks of 9/11 (Chemtob, Nomura, and Abramovitz)- shows that those who have suffered trauma are more likely to be traumatized again by another catastrophic loss, what seems to have happened to Thomas is that, having lost his two children without knowing them and having never been able to assume the position of father for the second child after having lost the first before it was born, he can and does assume the position of grandfather when he is called to it by Oskar's need. After skipping a generation, he comes back to life.

Thus, the extended temporal frame of this novel and the multiple narrators with different stories that intersect in asymmetrically beneficial ways reveal themselves to be complex structures that stage the passage from traumatic loss through mourning. If an experience becomes traumatic to the individual because- as Freud theorizes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)- it arrives too soon without the protective symbolic frame of anticipation or anxiety, a remedy may be the arrival of meaning belatedly through the participation in someone else's story. Both temporality and the construction of a continuing subjectivity after trau-



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matic loss are not experienced as linear, but the gaps and displacements thereby produced need not be only malignant: These relations might be reconstructed as beneficial and therapeutic, given enough time and enough players, each of whom is endowed by his or her creator with a voice of his or her own.

The other narrator of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is Oskar's grandmother, whose survival has followed a different path. Her narration is also represented as only written, not spoken or thought, but again the writing is produced in a peculiar way. She types the story of her life on a typewriter given by Anna to Thomas, who in a moment of grief had pulled the ribbon out but had forgotten this when he gave his wife (Anna's sister) the machine so that she "could express herself rather than suffer herself" (119). She protests that her eyes are "crummy" (over and over and over again), so it is possible that she does not see that the thousand pages on which she has typed her life story are blank. The trauma of the Dresden firebombing has stopped up Thomas's speech, but she too suffers sensory loss.

Yet somehow, by one of the seemingly miraculous strategies of this novel, we can read what her husband cannot. We can read what she meant to write and what she did type. There are just no marks on the page that the characters read. Oskar, to whom much of what we read is addressed, will never be able to read her explanations of things, some of which she herself cannot understand but only record. But then he can talk to her and she to him, so he does not need the text as we do.

What her narration adds to our understanding of the sequence of the catastrophes of the Dresden firebombing and the attacks of 9/11 is that those, like her, who suffer the pain of loss but are able to mourn without being paralyzed for a time by melancholy (as is Thomas) can do so because they mourn the lost object of the past but do not foreclose the possibility of other objects being found in the future. She regrets that she never told her sister Anna how much she loved her, but she did not lose the idea of her own future as Thomas did when his first child and his first love died. Grandma (who is never given a personal name) still needs her own future: "One morning I awoke and understood the hole in the middle of me. I realized that I could compromise my life, but not life after me. I couldn't explain it. The need came before explanations" (177). She needs her own child who will come after her. This couple, these survivors of Dresden now surviving on the Up- per West Side of New York, cannot remedy each other's needs. They move and live in different times that are out of joint for the next forty years, the whole lifetime of their son. They are able to resume their life as a couple as grandparents, never having been parents together. They are there for Oskar in a way that they cannot be there for each other.

Reciprocity governed by an exchange based on equality in which the two partners are expected to meet each other's needs, as is figured here in the (modern) marriage, does not provide a means to mourn as Foer imagines it in his asymmetrical dynamic of lost and found objects. What he proposes as the structure for this transformation follows more closely the dynamics of the asymmetrical reciprocity of the transference in an analytic situation. Just as the analyst re-enacts a relationship in the transference that is not obvious to an objective observer, the melancholic may be transformed into a mourner by playing a role in someone




else's story, by becoming an object that has been found instead of a subject that has identified with a lost object (Freud, "Observations" 307).

It is important to see that the function that Oskar performs for his grandfather by creating a role for him in his (Oskar's) story is not mirrored by the grandfather performing that same function for Oskar. Yes, he is a helper, but he is not the figure who provides Oskar with the transformative identification that allows him (Oskar) to deliver his own deferred letters, in a manner of speaking, to his father.

In the climactic anti-climax of the novel, Oskar finds the owner of the key who has, coincidentally, been looking for him at the same time. The key had belonged to William Black's deceased father and unlocks a safe deposit box in which his last letter to his son is encrypted. But William Black had not known about the key or the letter until after the estate sale at which Oskar's father bought the vase con- taining the key as an anniversary present for his wife. William Black had no way of finding the man whose name he did not know, but there was the chance, he and Oskar speculate as they work together arranging the pieces of this puzzle, that the posters they had both put up while looking for the same man (Oskar's father) in the aftermath of 9/11 might have been side by side on a wall or post (299).

Thus Oskar has assumed a role by filling a gap in William Black's story, just as Grandpa has stepped in to fill a gap in Oskar's story. And likewise Oskar, as an object in someone else's story, undergoes a change in his subjectivity. He can begin to let go of his identification with his lost object and identify with this other son who has lost his father. Having satisfied William Black's quest to hear his father's last words to him by giving him the key to the safe deposit box, Oskar tells William Black about his own father's last message, something he has not told anyone, including the reader. Instead of giving himself another bruise, as he has done for the past two years when his pain becomes unbearable, he cries and asks the stranger to hold him so he can go on telling. And when he has told it all, about the eleven times he could not answer his father's question, he asks William Black:

"Do you forgive me?" "Do I forgive you?" "Yeah." "For not being able to pick up?" "For not being able to tell anyone." He said, "I do." (302)

Oskar does not find the lock for his key which he thought he needed: what he needs is not something that he can get for himself in an economy of equal exchange. He needs something that can only be given by someone who occupies a position both unlike and like his own: On the one hand, William Black is an adult who can understand the child's fear, but this would not matter if Oskar could not also identify with him as a bereaved son. The forgiveness of this stranger allows Oskar to return to his family in a different emotional configuration.

Oskar needs the forgiveness of his parent, not from his father for his failure to pick up the phone, but from his mother, who has also been consumed by her own mourning, for his failure to tell her that he could not respond to his father's call. His dread that he would lose her too if he told her is what has been unbearable for him. Rather than this being only a scene of commiseration between two sons who



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have lost their fathers, William Black- a childless divorced man- must speak as the loving mother. He has been cast in this role, just as an analyst might be cast as a man or a woman in the fantasy of the analysand, regardless of the analyst's gender. By speaking as such, he figures for Oskar the possibility of living as the object of his mother's love and being able to share his love for his father with his mother. His grief will not kill her, as he had feared it might when he told her that he would have preferred that she had died had the choice been his (171-72). After this scene of forgiveness, he returns to his mother and accepts his identity as a son: "In my only life, she was my mom, and I was her son" (324).

The pattern of asymmetrical reciprocity that characterizes the parenting and therapeutic treatment seen here is transformative at this critical moment. It presents a vivid contrast to the limits of mutuality (or reciprocity governed by same- ness) as a source of healing. The marriage plot as a narrative vehicle does not provide a dynamic that allows the character who has been traumatized by loss to replace the lost object rather than identify with it indefinitely to the detriment of the ego. This paralysis is evident in DeLillo's novel about 9/11 to which I will now turn. In the most fundamental terms of this analysis, the circumscribed temporal framework required by the marriage plot and the focus on two members of the same generation seems to be a setting for endless melancholy rather than the processes of mourning. Even in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the partners who survived Dresden are not able to help each other. Rather, we see in Foer's novel that the temporal framework of the story is extended so that it can include an interlude that functions as a period of latency. When other generations can be produced in the future, then the subject-object relations produced by traumatic loss can be reconfigured in a different story. They are displaced (metonymically) and thereby revalued. This is Nachträglichkeit writ on the scale of generations rather than the individual consciousness.

II.

In this exploration of the comparative values of different narrative structures, I differ, for example, from John Updike, who in his New Yorker review of Extreme- ly Loud and Incredibly Close complained that a child was not an appropriate focus for the negotiation of the social contract that he considers to be the proper subject of the novel and to be made in the framework of marriage: "However sen- sitive and observant, the ordinary child lacks property and the capacity for sexual engagement; he exists, therefore, on the margins of the social contract- a rider, as it were, on the imperatives and compromises of others" (138). What is interesting for my present purposes in this claim about the novel is how this concern with "property and the capacity for sexual engagement" (both governed by symmetrical reciprocity) presents a structurally different context in which to try to work out the traumatic effects of loss in a number of novels about 9/11, one in which the social contract seems paralyzed by the endless litigation of loss.

This economy of symmetrical reciprocity is explicit in a couple of 9/11 novels that I will mention briefly before offering a more detailed analysis of Fall-




ing Man. In Jay Mclnerney's The Good Life (2006), an adulterous affair would seem at one point to save the hero and heroine, who have met at a volunteer- staffed soup kitchen at Ground Zero. This true love is thwarted by the heroine's attachment to her children, who have been borne to her sister in a surrogate pregnancy. But for the 'hero,' the promise of redemption by mutuality is lost: "She was his lost twin, his sundered other half, and after half a lifetime he had found her, and now would let her go" (361). In Helen Schulman's A Day at the Beach (2007), the choreographer husband conceives the duet that will conclude his latest ballet even as his wife and muse withdraws from their partnership to partner with their autistic son. The husband believes that any debt he might have as a German to the Jewish people from which his wife is descended has been paid by his artistic creations 'on' her, his ballerina. It seems like more than a coincidence that none of the novels end with any sign of a transformation in the future of the characters' relation to their experience of the catastrophic events of the past. The men have lost the women they loved; the women cling to the children figured as already lost. Life goes on- but as a compulsive repetition in a game without pleasure.

This is the grim fate of the hero of Don DeLillo's Falling Man who is a survivor of the attacks on the World Trade Center and who seeks a remedy first in his failed marriage to a woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, then in a brief affair with another survivor, and finally in the timelessness of Las Vegas poker games. The temporal framework for this novel is the years immediately following 9/11, with the background of the characters' lives before 9/11 being provided through the diagetic narration of the characters and the narrator but which is not, however, represented mimetically. The narration begins with the hero, Keith Neudecker, walking away from the towers as they collapse, and it ends with the moment just before that one. Tying the end of the novel to its beginning seems here not to signal the possibility of a transformation of the meaning of what one has just read the way that Marcel Proust's narrative does, but rather an endless loop. It repeats and replays (like the poker games to which Keith retreats in Las Vegas) rather than twisting itself (like the Möbius strips of Foer's narratives) into the possibilities of new meaning. This is a very different sense of time and the meaning of the passage of time than that proposed by Foer's métonymie linking of the traumas of Dresden and 9/11.

DeLillo's handling of point of view and narration is also significantly different from Foer's and closely resembles that of other authors who have written novels of marriage and melancholy in response to September 11. These differences are suggestive of the kind of subject-object relations that are described by Freud as distinguishing mourning and melancholy. In these novels of melancholy, what Freud calls "the shadow of the object" falls upon the ego, which is then "judged by a special agency, as though it were the object, the forsaken object" ("Mourning and Melancholia" 249).

In Falling Man, the estranged couple that has been reunited after Keith es- capes from the Twin Towers are the main characters, and the focalization of the narrative shifts between them for most of the novel. The voice moves frequently within this frame from that of the characters to that of a heterodiegetic narrator-



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who is not a character in the narrative- and back again.7 This strategy creates the sense of the omniscient narrator having access to the characters' thoughts and feelings of which they themselves may not be conscious, thus creating very per- meable boundaries between these different registers of narrative existence. This is the classic effect of the free indirect discourse (style indirect libre). What this structure also creates here is a sense of the omnipresence of the objective narrator that falls like a shadow over the whole narrative, absorbing the reader's attention regardless of the different focalizations. The heterodiegetic narrator looms, seem- ing ominously limitless, as it is unclear at many moments which perceptions and judgments belong to him and which belong to the characters.

This limitlessness is not curtailed even in the chapter that breaks away from the dyad of the couple, a chapter two-thirds of the way through the novel that fo- calizes through one of the terrorists in training. Here also, the voice is sometimes that of the character Hammad and sometimes that of the heterodiegetic narrator as, for example, when the narrative moves from Hammad's memory of his flight lessons: "The windshield is birdproof. The aileron is a movable flap." The next paragraph begins: "He prays and sleeps, prays and eats. These are dumb junk meals often taken in silence" (176). In the final chapter of the novel which takes place on the morning of 9/11, the narrative moves from the direct representation of his thoughts after the plane has been hijacked ("Carry your soul in your hand"); to a mediated representation of his experience ("He believed he could see straight into the towers even though his back was to them"); to a narration of his action ("he fastened his seatbelt") (238-39). Then, in the middle of the paragraph in which the plane makes impact, the pronoun "he" ceases to refer to the terrorist and begins to refer to Keith, who is about to survive. DeLillo ends the novel with this scene: Keith's escape is focalized through his point of view, but the voice of the heterodiegetic narrator concludes the text with the image of a falling shirt, "arms waving like nothing in this life" (246).

DeLillo's use of multiple focalizations in Falling Man, both internal (through characters) and external (through a heterodiegetic narrator), creates a vertiginous effect because there seems to be no motive at any particular moment for these shifts except to show that the heterodiegetic narrator can appear anywhere. The vacilla- tion between interiority and exteriority can be understood as a kind of narrative performance of a reconfiguration of boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity that figures the internalization of the lost object by the ego of the subject.

This destabilization of boundaries between subject and lost object is nowhere more evident than in the paragraph referred to above when the "he" of the nar-

7 This is where the analytical tools of narratological analysis are useful in sorting out the many dimensions of what it usually suffices to call 'point of view.' In particular, the distinction that Genette makes between focalization and voice clarifies the complexity of the epistemological relation of the narration and the perception that informs it. Without introducing more terminological complexities than are necessary to the task at hand of delineating the formal characteristics that these melancholy novels share, it is possible to see that there is an implicit staging of subject-object relations in the choices of focalization and voice that the author chooses. Appropriately, 'focalization' is the key category in the aspect of the narrative that Genette calls 'mood.'




ration changes from the terrorist to Keith. What is important to recognize here, however, is that the dominant yet disembodied (and therefore lost) objectivity is that of the narrator, whose shadow falls on all other subject positions. One moment the focalization is that of this 'minor' character who has previously had only one chapter devoted to him, and then suddenly the "he" is Keith. The heterodiegetic narrator controls this shift that blurs the distinction between the two "he" positions to which the pronoun refers. Although it might have been some part of DeLillo's project to try to make the terrorist more 'human' by endowing him with subjectivity, I would suggest that the way in which Hammad is positioned shows how the subjectivities of all of the characters are overwhelmed by the objectivity of the heterodiegetic narrator. His omnipresence holds them in the melancholic position, able to do what they cannot, as when the narrator's voice is used when Keith is unable to think in words. This loss of the ability to use various kinds of symbols is, as Vickroy also notes, symptomatic of trauma (31). On the last page of the novel, the narrator witnesses Keith's existence and steps in to speak for him: "He could not find himself in the things he saw and heard [...]. That's where everything was, all around him, falling away, street signs, people, things he could not name." The last paragraph reads: "Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life" (246). When Keith is in a state of speechless shock, the narrator's voice fills the void with a simile, a trope dedicated to making the incomprehensible understandable.

The narrator's intervention at this point functions like a deus ex machina that validates his own untraumatized objectivity. Such a display of rhetorical power at this point when the character is absolutely speechless seems an anomaly in the context of the fluidity of their previous relations in which the narrative moves eas- ily from the character's focalization and voice to the voice of the narrator. Here, his difference and dominance come to the fore. The peculiarity of this narrative strategy is that the heterodiegetic narrator seems to have positioned himself as the lost object who can never be replaced. There is no other, different heterodiegetic narrator who might appear to configure relations of subjectivity and objectivity differently. This is the only game in town. The dominance of a single heterodiegetic narrator shows itself as an obstacle to the possibility of the characters re- placing him with some other objective structure of meaning and thus working through their loss by mourning.

III.

The difference between these novels of melancholy and mourning is thus created in various registers of narrative. I have focused in this analysis on that of the subject-object relations of the narrators and characters and that of the temporal frame of the story to show what different possibilities seem to be opened or closed by these choices, at least insofar as this particular topic of the aftermath of 9/11 is concerned. In psychoanalytic terms, I have suggested a reading of these narrative structures as deploying the transference of subject-object relations either to create or to foreclose the possibility of mourning and also as staging the deferred



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action of trauma. Foer's strategies of multiple narrators and multiple generations play out an alternative to the inevitable transmission of traumatic effects across generations by showing how a complex rearrangement of the roles that characters play for each other might be therapeutic.

This sense of the possibility of transformation and regeneration animates Foer's work in more registers than I have been able to consider here. However, I would like to conclude by referring to the image of the man falling from the North Tower that haunts both of these novels in order to suggest one more way in which their dispositions toward mourning or melancholy work. In DeLillo's novel, a performance artist who stages his falls at unpredictable sites around New York finally dies of "natural causes" but "[s]uffered from chronic depression due to a spinal condition," an injury associated with his performances during which he is secured only by a safety harness (222). In Foer's novel, the jump/fall is reconstructed in its last pages by printing a series of images in which the order of time is reversed: In this flipbook, the falling man ascends into the sky. Foer's artifice is obviously fictive. It does not pretend to save the man's life. It does show that those who survive can create an end to the story that is not determined by the natural force of gravity. Foer thus enlists narrative techniques that counter the claims of realism in order to stage the transformations of subject-object relations necessary to the processes of mourning, thus demonstrating that these textual experiments can serve as effectively to engage the reader in these therapeutic transferences as they can to register the disruptions, distortions, and repetitions of trauma and melancholy.

The gap between the experience and its representation as meaning is the ground for the possibility of a different ending. The unconscious psychic processes of repression and/or dissociation may create gaps that foreclose meaning for a time, but from different temporal and subjective perspectives, the gap might become a period of latency after which a new meaning can be made thanks to Nachträglichkeit. Thus, melancholy may be brought to an end, and the work of mourning can proceed.

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After the Fact: Mourning, Melancholy, and Nachträglichkeit in Novels of 9/11