A Thematic Study Of The Post 9/11 Cultural - Essay Example

Trauma and A Thematic Study of the Post 9/11 Cultural, Emotional Climate as it is Discovered in Ian McEwen’s Saturday and Pat Barker’s Double Vision through Fear, and Trauma Name of Student Name of University Trauma and 2 A Thematic Study of the Post 9/11 Cultural, Emotional Climate as it is Discovered in Ian McEwen’s Saturday and Pat Barker’s Double Vision through Fear, and Trauma In contemporary literature of the post-9/11 era, the increased anxiety and fear that has stayed at a heightened level since that event is reflected within the construction of storylines, characterizations, and emotional content. Ian McEwen’s novel, Saturday, creates a multi-leveled commentary on this culturally emotional undercurrent. McEwen creates a story in which a man experiences traumatic events that occur from a distance, in the form of an experienced threat, and then by way of a personal event. In Double Vision, by Pat Barker, the experience of losing a loved one through the traumatic event of a war is then echoed in the experiences of the characters. Both novels create imagery that reflects an infusion of fear into all things, whether they be beautiful or mundane. The traumatic effects of personal events that are merged with the traumatic events that have become influential on a global level create an expressive tension that has influenced the emotional undercurrent of the thematic tone that McEwen and Barker create. Because of the availability of content rich visual news with personalized stories that relate to traumatic events, catastrophes within the world and the emotional effects of those tragedies can now be lived vicariously through internet access, adopting the cultural impact that those events carry across cultures. Anthropologically speaking, the world has seen a shift within the last one hundred years that has created a voyeurism in which the emotional content of an event can be intimately experienced. E. Ann Kaplan, (2005, p. 2) in the introduction of her book, Trauma Culture: the Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, speaks of how the events in New York of 9/11 personally affected her. Trauma and 3 She says, “the difficulty of distinguishing trauma from vicarious trauma emerges . . . One finds the complex interconnections between individual and cultural trauma - such that, indeed, where the ‘self’ begins and cultural reactions end may seem impossible to determine”. Kaplan (2005, p. 4) discusses this experience in relation to the way in which personal fears from childhood, experiences that had shaped the way in which she approached the world, were heightened after 9/11. She says, “the new traumatic event merged with the childhood events, so that history and memory, time, and space collapsed into one present time of terror; 9/11 produced a new subjectivity”. The trauma that is related to an event can now have a global impact that previous to this time has never been known. The way in which the thematic material within literature has been affected has changed an essential quality of emotional disassociation. For example, in previous literature, as in life, a woman who has lost a husband in a war had an emotional disassociating capability because, while she might be devastated that her husband had passed, it was more than likely that the actual horror of the war had not become emotionally available and was not a part of the associations made to his death. A culture would experience the trauma of the effects that flowed back from the front, which could include economic effects, stories of an oral tradition, and possibly viewing the physical damage done to soldiers sent back after being injured. However, in an age where this new merging exists of real experience and vicarious experience, it can be understood that a woman whose husband has died in a military conflict in this age can see evidence of what he might have experienced and create an emotional vocabulary to associate with Trauma and 4 what she has experienced via the media. When she hears the news, she has lived a small part of the war through reports and emotionally charged news stories. In a world where individuals must bare the emotional baggage of multiple cultures, a heightened state of stress has become influential on the way in which the arts and literature make interpretations. In Pat Barker’s, Double Vision, Kate has experienced the loss of her husband during a military conflict. The way in which this experiences touches her becomes embodied in all of her subsequent experiences, and merged with all of the traumatological experiences she has shared with the world. According to Elizabeth Goldberg (2007, p. 188), “Pat Barker’s Double Vision reflects upon the challenges of representation in the post 9/11 context. The mythical ethos of the novel divides the space of home from nature to demarcate vulnerability and safety from harm”. Goldberg presents as an example of this the first traumatic event in the novel in which Kate is involved in a car wreck. Barker (2004, p. 4) describes the landscape as representing a willful danger comprised of “acres of closely planted trees, rank upon rank of them, a green army marching down the hill”. A sense of the ever present danger that now so uniformly waits outside the door is infused into nature. This reflects the ever present sense that there is no where to run, no where to hide. As the world has become so small, so fragile, the ever present experience has become that threats are everywhere. The associations between fear and violence, and nature continue for Barker as she uses flowers as a resource to create a dichotomy between what is normally perceived as beautiful and how that beauty has become tainted, restrained, agonized. She describes roses as “tight, formal, dark red buds, like drops of blood in the white room” (Barker Trauma and 5 2004: 7). Descriptive devices like this maintain a sense of horror and help to create a subtle, but present state of tension that reflects how one can never be relaxed within the overall climate of the new culture of fear that has developed since 9/11. Later, the story describes roses that Peter Wingrave brings to Justine as “red roses with wire wrapped around the stems and buds to pin the petals closed” (Monteith 2005, p. 291). Barbara Andrew (1996, p. 121), in her essay titled, “The Psychology of Tyranny: Wollstonecraft and Woolf on the Gendered Dimension of War” discusses “middle-class women and soldiers as conspirators in their own subordination because they embrace the illegitimate power afforded by beauty and gallantry“. She makes the claim that “Middle class women and soldiers are more concerned with appearances, with being thought of as being beautiful and virtuous, than with truth or freedom”(Andrew 1996, p.121). By using Andrew’s conceptualization of the draw of beauty on the willingness to be subordinated, one can see the imagery of the roses as symbolic for the way in which even beauty, in its willingness to be subordinated, is yet agonized further by extrinsic influences. As it supports the thematic tone of Barker’s book, this symbolism unites the feminine with the violent under universal terms, still lovely, but stressed from forces that are under tension, traumatized by influences that are not expected nor desired. Diverse from the way in which roses are symbolic of violence, is the contrast between the innocence of daffodils and the violence of the attack on Justine. According to Monteith, “The burglars’ attack on Justine takes place on a beautiful daffodil-filled, sunny day, and Wordsworthian regenerative images of spring are blasted open with the first blow to her head and are reintroduced when Stephen visits her with simple Trauma and 6 daffodils“. The way in which fear can overcome anything that becomes associated with the memory of a fearful incident, reveals how vulnerable all aspects of life can be to the influence of threat. In Saturday, Ian McEwen’s novel, his protagonist, Perowne says, “And now, what days are these? Baffled and fearful, he mostly thinks when he takes time from his weekly round to consider” (McEwen 2006 p. 3). After seeing a plane as it descends in distress earth bound, he examines the many ways in which the world has influenced how he interprets what he has seen. As Perowne contemplates what he has seen, thoughts drift unwillingly toward the fears created when the planes in the US were purposefully aimed at architectural targets. He says “This past hour he’s been in a state of wild unreason, in a folly of over interpretation. It doesn’t console him, that anyone in these times, standing at the window in his place, might have leapt to the same conclusions”(McEwen 2006, p. 40). Perowne recognizes that the fears he feels are now a universal state of anxiety. He feels these fears because something about the plane felt outside of the familiar, a condition that would have raised no flags before 2001 in a pre 9/11 world. However, in the world that has manifested post 9/11, “He sees now the details he half-ignored in order to nourish his fears: that the plane was not being driven into a public building, that it was making a regular, controlled descent, that it was on a well-used flight path - none of this fitted the general unease” (McEwen 2006, p. 40). In the process of trying to understand the way in which he has been affected by 9/11 and how that has afflicted the way he processes some events, he references Shrodinger’s cat. He says “He told himself there were two possible outcomes - the cat Trauma and 7 dead or alive. But he’d already voted for the dead, when he should have sensed it straight away - a simple accident in the making. Not an attack on our whole way of life then”(McEwen 2006, p. 40). This underlying question that agitates the sense of security that has been culturally lost as to whether the “cat is dead or alive” is at the core of the way in which individuals now approach society. The questions remain, “Is this the day that it happens again? Does it now happen to me? Society is now waiting for the next moment that will reinforce the unused fears that shadow life in a post 9/11 world. His experience can be associated to Sigmund Freud’s commentary in his essay, “The Uncanny”. He describes a situation where a number, such as 62, is found several times during the day by an individual. In this hypothetical situation, the proximity of these numbers appearing can lead to the belief that this coincidence might have an inflated relevance. Freud says that “unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number, taking it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted him” (Freud 1919, p.427). In this era, anxiety over waiting for “the next event” has created persistent phantoms of these fears within ordinary, daily experiences. Thematically, the undertone of fear based on faulty and intangible conclusions crawls through McEwen’s work, foreshadowing the realistic threat that brings the novel to a climax. McEwen uses the unusual device of speaking in the present tense which creates a strange, unsure foreboding. A story that is told in the past tense has a defined ending. The voice of narration has already experienced the end of the story. However, in present Trauma and 8 tense, a sense of the unknown becomes more palpable. The events are told without hysteria and without an overly descriptive narration. The economy of description allows the reader to move through the story within the moment, letting each episode absorb at the rate that Perowne absorbs the impact. He relates stories that occurred previous to the moment in the past tense, but in working in the present, the traumatic climate and the resulting fear is understood as being a part of the current culture. It isn’t a historical manifestation, but a tangible undercurrent that is not a matter of what occurred before, but in what is currently happening. The issue of trauma is difficult to define. Jill Bennett quotes American philosopher, Stanley Cavell as he explains that “one is not free to believe or disbelieve an expression of pain: (Y)ou are forced to respond, either to acknowledge or to avoid it”(Bennett 2005, p. 48). Bennett goes on to further explain the connections that are created by experience pain and trauma. She says that “The important feature of this argument is that it places pain immediately within a nexus of social relationships - so that, like sense memory, pain is seen to be negotiated as a ’gnawing encounter’” She also says that “the lived experience of pain is shaped by the language - and also the silences - that surround it”. In both McEwen’s and Barker’s work, the language used creates a tone of anxiety. Thematically, the larger traumas that occur historically affect the response to the traumas that occur as part of the plotlines. A keen recognition of the social change that has occurred in respect to safety and in the belief that tomorrow is a place in which to believe, shadows the everyday response to a sense of community. An ironic complacency of moving through life as if those traumas have not occurred, creates a tension within the Trauma and 9 concept of ‘the life before’ and ‘the life after’. In the urgency for a return to normalcy, the response to pain can be to ignore it, however it has a voice that will resurrect, in the way that the climax of each of the novels finds the storyline bending to the will of that pain as traumatic and violent events create a focus for the fears that have developed from cultural traumas. The social anxieties that have been infused into society post 9/11 have created a climate of fearful waiting. On that day in September, there was a feeling that tomorrow might not come, that the world had changed so dramatically that whatever was suppose to manifest in all of the tomorrows that followed would never be what was thought to be those tomorrows on September 10th. The way in which government, career, airplanes, and religion were defined was erased and replaced with distrust, paranoia, and sensationalized emotional empathy. An average day began to include moments that embraced subtle expectations of an attack. The consistent lack of that experience being fulfilled creates a perpetual state of anticipation, with life providing just enough cues to keep an aspect of that intensity in motion. McEwen and Barker use this sense of anticipation in order to develop stories that communicate the culturally unique experience of the availability of voyeuristic emotional experiences within traumatological events. While McEwen creates a dialogue for the topic, Barker infuses this anxiety into all aspects of the story, including the connections made to natural elements. Authors who write in this post-9/11 atmosphere, reflect those relevant manifestations of fear that pervade daily life, the unconscious and conscious expectation of the next blow that society believes will happen. Trauma and 10 Bibliography ANDREW, B. “The psychology of tyranny: Wollstonecraft and Woolf on the gendered dimension of war”. Found in Warren, K., & Cady, D. L. (1996). Bringing peace home: feminism, violence, and nature. A Hypatia book. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. BARKER, P. (2004). Double vision. New York, Picador. BENNETT, J. (2005). Empathic vision: affect, trauma, and contemporary art. Cultural memory in the present. Stanford, Calif, Stanford University Press. BOOKER, M. K. (2005). Encyclopedia of literature and politics: censorship, revolution, and writing. Westport, Conn, Greenwood Press. BRADFORD, R. 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