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Cultural Trauma as a Social Construct: 9/11 Fiction and the Epistemology of Communal Pain

“If there was one thing writers agreed about in response to 9/11,” notes Richard Gray in the opening page of his book After the Fall (2011), “it was the failure of language; the terrorist attacks made the tools of their trade seem absurd” (1). As the most recent, and arguably the most formidable, cultural trauma of the contemporary American society, the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 is treated by many scholars as an unrepresentable event, creating immense difficulties for writers to respond to, so much that their simplest tool, the language, would fail miserably. This approach to the aftermath of 9/11 is an extension of the general theory of trauma, developed mainly in the 1990s, most notably through works of Cathy Caruth (1995; 1996), Shoshana Felman (1993; with Dori Laub, 1992), and Kirby Farrell (1998). Under the influence of a poststructuralistpsychoanalytic trend of theory, the literary criticism of cultural trauma was initially established around interpretations of Second World War atrocities, especially the Holocaust, and then expanded to a wide range of social events that, in one way or another, left a deep impression on a society’s culture. It is based on the argument that when something horrible happens to a group of people, not ready to receive and digest its appalling enormity, the response lies deep under their consciousness without having any chance to be properly expressed. What is called trauma, then, is the result of both the original event and the anxiety of keeping its emotional and cognitive responses repressed in the unconscious. “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event,” writes Caruth, “but rather in the way it’s very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Unclaimed 4). In the next step, trauma becomes a cultural issue, bringing to light a general problem of human culture: the problem of representation. As Caruth elaborates, it is “in the equally widespread and bewildering encounter with trauma . . . that we can begin to recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential,” and so the main objective behind analyzing trauma is a “rethinking of reference” in human history (Unclaimed 11). In this sense, trauma brings about a valuable opportunity to discuss the more general issues of communication, memory, and representation in the modern human culture. While it gained immense popularity in the 1990s, this approach to cultural trauma has been recently under severe criticism for either its self-celebratory attitude in using horrible human disasters as opportunities for abstract theoretical adventures, or its overextension of a problematic trope, whereby cultural trauma is loosely based on a metaphor for individual psychic trauma. These critiques have opened a gap to be filled