BINDING: HYBRID BODIES AFTER 9/11

So far in this book, I have suggested that the fiction of the new century is involved in the reimagining of the relationship between time, narrative and embodied subjectivity. In its representation of time and history, in its negotiation of political and biological subjectivity after the lapsing of certain forms of humanism, in its production of experimental kinds of realism, today’s novel is striving to produce new forms in which to imagine ethical, political and embodied life. One of the ways in which this effort has taken its most visible form is in the development of a wide range of fictions which seek to understand and to represent the emerging relationship between global power and literary, political and paramilitary resistance to such power. The 9/11 novel, so called, has borne witness to the fact that the terrorist attacks that occurred in New York and Washington on 11 September have rebalanced the relationship between global hegemony and those countercultural forms and forces which have opposed it. It is in the fiction written in response to the terrorist event that, for Don DeLillo, ‘marks the actual beginning of the twenty-first century’ that one can see the beginnings of a new way of thinking about global relations, a new and ethically challenging way of mapping the tensions between political radicalism, violent insurrection, literary innovation, and the power and force of the global market place. If, so far in this book, I have been suggesting the outlines of a new kind of body that emerges in the contemporary novel, a new way of weaving time and history and embodiment together, then it is in the relationship between fiction and contemporary terrorism that the political context for such an effort is at its sharpest, and most urgent.