Traumatic Brain Injury in Post-9/11 Fiction

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Periodically throughout Jess Walter's 2006 novel The Zero, the brain-injured detective Brian Remy confesses his confusion to interlocutors ranging from the woman he has woken up beside to his work partner to colleagues at a bar. "I'm not sure what's real and what isn't," he claims; "I can't keep track of anything anymore."1 Remy means for these comments to be taken literally; he frequently finds himself coming to consciousness in the midst of unfamiliar situations. But, in what becomes a running gag, those to whom he speaks interpret his comments not in relation to his neuropsychological condition (which is, of course, invisible to them) but as a generalized series of complaints about post-9/11 New York. At the bar, as he notes, "Some of the guys laughed. Others nodded as if he'd struck a chord." 2 "I know what you mean,"3 they say, and "Maybe that's what life is like for everyone."4 In Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, also published in 2006 and nominated, like The Zero, for that year's National Book Award, something similar occurs: all the characters who interact with brain-injured protagonist Mark Schluter reflect that they too suffer from the syndrome that afflicts him. The recurrence of such scenes does more than reveal the similarity of these otherwise quite different post-9/11 American novels. It suggests that the attacks' cultural afterlife—at least as of the mid-2000s—is evident through a series of disruptions to and distortions of memory. By considering the topic of memory, both novels also offer a rejoinder to recent complaints that post-9/11 fiction is either too realistic or not realistic enough.5 In both, actual recent political and social events expose what Marc Redfield has called, in relation to the 9/11 attacks, the "virtual[ization of] trauma" itself.

In fact, traumatic brain injury, or TBI, is central to both novels, although neither identifies it as such: each begins in the immediate aftermath of a major head injury suffered by its protagonist, in The Zero a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head and in The Echo Maker one of multiple injuries sustained in a truck rollover. Both repeatedly juxtapose literal discussion of this injury—the fact that each protagonist's debilitation is the effect of a particular, physical event—with claims that the injury exemplifies more general cultural trends and attitudes. This juxtaposition echoes recurrent debates about the nature and effects of TBI itself. Characterized as the "signature wound or injury for our time,"6 TBI has generally been described as either an individual, empirically verifiable, physiological condition or an essentially "metaphorical" "trauma" whose origins are cultural.7 But Walter and Powers expose the slippage between these explanations as well as between the real and imagined and between what Redfield calls a post-9/11 confusion of "knowledge," "amnesia," "memory" and "hyperbolic forgetting."8 In the process, both explore what scholar Mark Seltzer has called, in a discussion of trauma, "a fundamental shattering or breaking-in of [ . .  . ] boundaries,"9 including those between "the physical" and "the psychical" and between the "torn and exposed individual"— here, the TBI-afflicted protagonist—and the "public spectacle."10

What Seltzer also calls "coalescence or collapse"11 is evident in both novels' refusal to identify TBI as such, as well as their evasive treatment of the 9/11 attacks. (This evasiveness exemplifies Redfield's implication that after 9/11 amnesia functions as a mode of memory that is "projected against the ground zero of a hyperbolic forgetting."12 The Zero is mostly set in Lower Manhattan while the remains of the WTC are still smoldering; at the time of his injury, protagonist Brian Remy has been working as a first responder. Ground Zero, obliquely referred to as "the Zero," is always in the background. Remy and his partner Paul Guterak several times tour the site, and Remy is hired to investigate a terrorist plot purportedly linked to the suspicious actions before the attacks of a woman working in the Towers. Yet The Zero never describes the attacks (which Remy can't remember until the end of the novel) or even identifies them as such; Remy and his coworkers instead repeatedly refer to "that day."