The Business of Forgetting: Postwar Living Memorials and the Post-Traumatic Suburb in Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft

Abstract

In one of the few scholarly essays to date devoted to Chang-rae Lee's third novel, Aloft (2004), Mark Jemg observes that critics have struggled to make sense of the book, both in the context of Lee's earlier work and within the emerging canon of recent American fiction. (1)The conundrum centers on the novel's protagonist: Lee appropriates the voice of white, middle-class, middle-aged male instead of what New Ybrker critic James Wood calls the solitary, tormented Asian American narrators of his previous novels, Native Spcaker (1996) and A Gesture Lift (1999). On these grounds, Wood dismisses Aloft, asserting that it sinks into familiarity that is cliched and histrionic.(2) Lee's decision to follow his earlier work, praised for its originality and transnational scope, with prototypical male midlife crisis novel is indeed perplexing, especially when one considers that the novel takes place in the geographical and temporal backyard of the September 11, 2001 attacks. I argue, however, that it is precisely as post-9/11 novel that Aloft demands to be read. Such claim may seem counterintuitive. In his book After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (2011), Richard Gray charges that by and large, post-9/11 American novels merely assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures. The crisis is, in every sense of the word, domesticated (30). At *first blush, this seems an accurate enough description of Aloft, which begins with its protagonist, Jerry Battle, aloft in his own single engine plane, surveying his Long Island postwar suburb and surrounding area, and taking note of the scarred earth where the Twin Towers had once stood. Yet the unfamiliar is quickly subsumed by the familiar: although the novel initially acknowledges the large-scale catastrophe in the near distance, it sinks comfortably into the well-mapped terrain of the postwar suburban novel as it recounts the travails of its amiable but detached protagonist. By novel's end, Jerry himself suffers devastating personal loss while flying his plane, so that he lands, presumably once and for all, and retreats into the bosom of his home, seemingly fulfilling Gray's damning accusation that the post-9/ 11 novel reduces a turning point in national and international history to little more than stage in sentimental education (30). It is my contention, however, that the novel's very insistence upon the quotidian and the domestic provides the basis for its unique contribution to the growing corpus of post-9/11 literature. Novelists such as Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer have written post-9/11 novels that vividly return readers to the day's devastation, by way of characters directly affected by the attacks. In contrast, Lee formulates challenging ethics that responds to an event whose reverberations have become increasingly peripheral. The novel therefore does not replicate the conditions of large-scale catastrophe but instead those of an anxious, uncertain everyday in order to imagine moral framework for bearing witness and responsibility in trauma's ongoing wake. Kaja Silverman claims that historical trauma--whether war, an earthquake, or large-scale terrorist attack--has the capacity to interrupt or even deconstitute what society assumes to be its master narrative (55). Certainly the events of that day profoundly unsettled nation that may have been made complacent by the longest economic boom in history. But the speed with which the government sought to return the nation to pre-9/11 status quo was likewise staggering. Just days after the attacks, for instance, President Bush told the nation that we were engaged in fight for our principles, which would require every citizen's continued participation and confidence in the American economy Framing the stakes even more explicitly the president's brother and Florida governor Jeb Bush admonished Americans to consider it their patriotic duty to go shopping, go to restaurant, take cruise, travel with their family, because frankly, the terrorists win ifAmericans don't go back to normalcy (qtd. …