Traumatic Brain Injury in Post-9/11 Fiction

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Here, the interplay between "story," "stories" that are "true," "fictional truth," and "narrat[ion]" signals the difficulty of distinguishing these concepts. Weber self-identifies as an author; his wife sometimes calls him "Famous Gerald." Yet he here acknowledges the charges journalists bring against him throughout the novel, chief among them that he has used the stories of real people for personal gain while ignoring their actual suffering. Paradoxically, his use of the third person in this apparently intimate confession suggests, at this moment of self-revelation, his need to fictionalize his own experiences.

This passage is spoken by a secondary character in relation to a subplot. A fictional character who resembles at least one real-life neuroscientist, Weber here considers the real-life implications of his fictionalizations. Such reflections invite us to recognize that Powers too is implicated: Weber's ruminations enable Powers himself indirectly to speak about—or more exactly to interrogate—his own aims in writing. What, that is, does it mean to convey real-life neurological conditions in fiction? Does Powers's post-9/11 novel represent, as do Weber's case histories, a savvy career move? (Powers did, after all, receive the 2006 National Book Award.) In fact, is it, as Weber elsewhere notes of his own writing (357), "basically immoral" to write fiction after 9/11? Or can such fiction be justified, partly because it is (only) fiction?

As I have been arguing, neither novel directly answers these questions about fiction's capacity to convey, and also to compete with, preexisting reality. Instead, both present what might be called facsimiles of fact-based fiction, apparently realistic fiction that avoids what some have called the hyperreality of 9/11 itself. Fiction is relevant, both suggest, only insofar as it interrogates its own relevance. Remy's gaps and Mark's Capgras are simultaneously individual and collective, physiological and tropological, real and imaginary, metaphoric and metonymic. In fact, TBI (along with other neuropsychological conditions) may be so compelling to these (and other) post-9/11 novelists because it forces positivist, (neuro)scientific discourse together with a sense of radical uncertainty. (The TBI plot is also at least implicitly political insofar as most recent American cases of TBI are the result of war injuries, a connection that was emerging as early as 2005.1 ) Or perhaps the explanation is simpler. Jonathan Lethem has argued that it has always been difficult to "distinguish amnesia from fiction,"2 a difficulty that may help explain why the concept of amnesia has become, at the start of the 21^st century, "a floating metaphor very much in the air."3 Certainly 21^st-century discourse—from discussions of Alzheimer's disease to the spate of recent thrillers about amnesiacs—has so far been deeply concerned with, and also deeply anxious about, memory loss, knowledge, and how they coincide.

Perhaps surprisingly, both novels end with the implication that the need to narrate or detect can, and perhaps even must, give way to something quite different. At several points, Remy observes that he feels "a kind of drifting contentment, slipped consciousness"4; he claims to have "convinced himself that if he just abandoned himself to this skidding, lurching life, without questioning it, things would turn out okay."5 Similarly, by the end of The Echo Maker (and with the help of a new drug protocol suggested by Weber), Mark stops chafing against Karin, acknowledging that he has "grown close [to her] over [the] months" following his accident6; "only some kind of direct synapse transfer," he reflects, could have given her knowledge of their shared childhood, "which means that something of his sister is actually downloaded inside this woman.[. . .] Some part of her brain, her soul. A little bit of Karin here."7 This voluntary relinquishing of the need to know and remember is relevant not only to these brain-injured protagonists but 21^st-century Americans more generally.

*Thanks to Jeanne Follansbee, Katherine Fusco, and Gautam Premnath for useful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Ann Keniston is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she has taught since 2002. She is the author of two monographs, including the just-published Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry (Iowa, 2015) and is coeditor of two collections on 21^st-century and post-9/11 American literature (with another forthcoming in 2016). She is at work on a new monograph on economics and 21^st-century American poetry, as well as a collection of poems.