Scapegoating in ‘Ground Zero’: Patrick McGrath's allegory of historical trauma

Abstract

Informed by trauma theory, recent discussions of post-9/11 literature have vehemently lamented the failure of works by Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney, or Ken Kalfus to incorporate the aesthetic paradigm shift precipitated by the traumatic effects of the terrorist attacks. Through a close reading of Patrick McGrath's novella ‘Ground Zero’ (Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, 2005) from a psychoanalytic and a narratological perspective (converging in the discourse of psychotherapy), this essay proposes the concept of transference as key to the narrativisation of post-9/11 trauma. The argument draws on previously unpublished archival material in 9/11 oral history as well as on psychoanalytic theories of transference and counter-transference (supplemented by René Girard's sociological work on the scapegoat) to recast the crisis of imagination that followed upon the terrorist attacks as primarily a narrative impasse. ‘Ground Zero’ engages both characters and readers in scapegoating games that mobilise discourses as diverse as racial persecution and narrative unreliability. In examining these forms of scapegoating, the essay derives from the transferability of evil (as evinced through scapegoating) a broader statement on the ethical function of narrative in the mediation of world-historical trauma.