City Chronic City, Jonathan Lethem, is not a novel of September 11, 2001. While the novel is set in a New York of the new millennium, and his characters explore the city, from the Upper East Side to Lower Manhattan's Town Hall. At no when the author mentions that day, nor even its salient features: no fire, no plane, no tower are discussed in this novel. Yet there is something going on in the literature of 11 September with Chronic
City. Maybe this is the result of reader who seeks in the New York novel traces the 2001 attacks. Already, with
Let the Great World Spin , Colum McCann explored the figure of the tightrope walker Philippe Petit, famously walked between the two rounds in 1974, directing the gaze towards the towers building on the nostalgia of an era over, one where the talk does not amount to talk about their destruction. Chronic
City becomes a novel about him specifically by the September 11 detours it takes not to name September 11, to circumvent the figures.
Forget the main character, Chase Insteadman, whose name (Man instead of ...) the place from the outset in the strange transitional space that is his life surrounded by marijuana smoke and the real almost alternating built by the character of Perkus Tooth. Which, in Lethem's work evokes September 11, these are indications of a threat and the underground days of gray fog.
The New York
Chronic City is grappling with a monster, described as an animal such as the legendary yeti, whose alleged apparitions are surprised by witnesses hallucinating. Because we must name the enemy, journalists and witnesses they decide is a tiger, bringing the ongoing destruction of an enemy known. "[...] Biller INSTEAD logged on to the City's Tiger Watch Web Site. The last monster HAD Been seen Two days ago, we Sixty-Eighth Street by a couple of undergraduates Hunter, Beneath rustling year Opened metal grating at a work site. There HAD Been No Casualties or damage, & the site ranked Risk Of An attack tonight as Yellow, or Low-to-Moderate " (P. 226).
The tiger is actually a machine that was digging a new subway line and that has apparently packed, developing its own "intelligence" and exceeding the levels of its operators. A kind of Frankenstein, in short, that strikes at any time (but especially at night) and, especially, causes evacuation (and conviction) of apartment buildings. Coming from below, the threat that is the tiger eventually make its own revitalization. But two features of this threat are interesting. On the one hand, it is, like terrorism, unpredictable: the machine does not hit in a logical, linear. It is surprising, moving, processing power. As the great figure of the post-September 11, Osama bin Laden, the tiger is watched, you imagine seeing the stalk, and its appearances change the alert level. On the other hand, machine, mythologized, driven both by witnesses as journalists, forced to accept changes that, in fact, is not so much coincidence that political considerations and planning. If there Lethem in a reflection on September 11, she may find here in a critical discourse of fear and security which led a majority of Americans not only accept restrictions in their freedom and individual rights but to wish for. The transformation of a machine of "mass destruction" in tiger gives a face "acceptable", is a process of infantilization witnesses: you do not see what you see, you see what we tell you that you see ... Chronic
If City does not mention September 11, or even the World Trade Center, the novel is built, however, according to a geometry with two poles: on the one hand, the fascination and fear of the tiger, the other, mist that floated over the city over a hole. Mentioned several times, This hole, located only vaguely as belonging to the "lower part of the Island" (p. 173), is associated with a gray mist ("gray fog") and a vague threat but constant. The hole, never named, never otherwise determined by the fog, is a sort of No Man's Land, dangerous dirt: "I Realized I Had not Been So Far Since The downtown gray fog's onset" (p. 233). Both the machine is, by its association with a tiger, custom designed, as the fog appears as an event without a date, without beginning, without end, but without apparent cause. The towers are not in Chronic City, destroyed. They are only from the fog, invisible, "Philippe Petit crossing impossible That distance of sky Between the towers, now unseen for months So Many behind-the gray fog" (p. 430), as if, should the lifting of the fog, they resurface. As with
Let the Great World Spin where the figure of Philippe Petit is used to mark the distance between the two towers, between the glorious past of their construction and their sudden absence, days of fog in the novel Lethem make visible a break in the life of the city between the before and after. But Lethem goes beyond mere temporal break. As le fait en mettant en scène le tigre, Lethem utilise le brouillard pour critiquer l’après-11 septembre : « Something happened, Chase, there was some rupture in this city. Since then, time’s been fragmented. Might have to do with the gray fog, that or some other disaster. Whatever the cause, ever since we’ve been living in a place that’s a replica of itself, a fragile simulacrum, full of gasps and glitches. A theme park, really! Meant to halt time’s encroachment. Of course such a thing is destined always to fail, time has a way of getting its bills paid. » (p. 389) La critique de Lethem ne se porte pas sur l’avant-11 septembre. Certes, un changement a eu lieu, dit le personnage, Perkus Tooth, but since September 11 that "we live in a world that is a simulacrum, a replica of himself. A theme park for fun, to put people to sleep, to prevent them from seeing what is really happening, the changes under way, impossible to counter. If Lethem has in this passage, a pessimistic view, it is not so much because he fears the return of terrorism, but because you can tweak endlessly with reality, it always ends up catching us up and ask her due. Perkus Tooth kind of seeing hallucinations (drugged and immersed in his own fog, that of marijuana), thus becomes a Cassandra, announcing the end of fear is not that we believe that, disguised, camouflaged supposedly for our protection, it will do no less and will be worse than the first disaster this "break in the city."
As surely, therefore, that Lynne Sharon Schwartz and Don DeLillo, attacking head-on attacks, wrote novels that are part of the literature on 11 September, Lethem is another vision of this new literature is accessed: the event has more to be named, it is in the background, and flat over the town, as the smell of chocolate, sweet, reminiscent of the smell of corpses floating in the city for weeks after the attacks. In rusant with the figures of the event, using them as leverage tacit Lethem built a critique of the mythologizing of September 11 and its aftermath. There would thus be a memory of Sept. 11, sponsored New York may be the best custodians.
