Mixing memory and denial. Claiming and coping with traumatic experience

Trauma has been part of the stuff of both history and literature across the ages, though its exploration has grown more systematic over the last century and a half, with the suffering caused by war at its center. Twenty-five years after September 11, thirty years after the Lajpat Nagar bombings, and thirty years since the publication of Infinite Jest, trauma remains a negotiation between remembering and refusing to remember. Reading Don DeLillo's Falling Man, Karan Mahajan's The Association of Small Bombs, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest together, this book asks what literature offers that clinical and historical discourse cannot. It examines how fiction creates a symbolic space in which fragmented identity is provisionally reassembled, denial is exposed rather than endured, and readers are drawn into an ethically charged encounter with suffering. Terrorism, colonial violence, addiction, and the modern economy of attention are treated here as facets of a single underlying problem: how trauma is represented, and how it is survived. INTRODUCTION/ 9                                                                     CHAPTER 1 – THEORETICAL BACKGROUND       47                                                                1. 1 Freud, Derrida, Lacan and Literary Trauma Theory/ 47 1. 2 Wounds and Significations/ 95 1. 3  Fragmented Narratives: The Intersection of Spectacle, Trauma and Identity/ 118              1. 4  Empathy and Its Discontents: The Lens of Empathy Studies/ 140 1. 5  Beyond the Attention Principle: Addiction, Technics, and the Economy of Capture/ 157 CHAPTER 2 – POST 9/11 ECHOES IN FALLING MAN/ 173 2. 1  9/11: The Desert of the Real/ 173                                                      2. 2 DeLillo’s Pre 9/11 Narrative/ 193                                                 2. 3 The Spectacle of the Wounded/ 210 2. 4 The Days After the Days After/ 226 CHAPTER 3 – TRAUMA’S IMPACT ON INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES IN THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS/ 240 3. 1 The Attention of Small Bombs/ 240                                            3. 2 Societal Response to Terrorism and its Influence on Identity/ 252 3. 3  Fragile Boundaries Between Victim and Perpetrator/ 269     3. 4  Fragmented Identities and the Crisis of Representation/ 287 CHAPTER 4 – DENIAL AND REPRESSION IN THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS/ 305 4. 1 The Logic of Death and The Ultimate Other/ 305                                                           4. 2 Divided Selves and Liminal Bodies/ 325                                                                 4. 3 The Hyperreal Matriarch/ 342 4. 4 The Love Laws of Attention/ 353 CHAPTER 5 – COPING WITH ENTERTAINMENT: ADDICTION, ATTENTION, AND TRAUMA IN INFINITE JEST/ 366 5. 1 The Novel That Watched Us Coming: Infinite Jest at Thirty/ 366 5. 2 Trauma, Repetition, and the Incandenza Family/ 381 5. 3  Debord, Baudrillard, and the Simulation of Pleasure/ 400 5. 4  Infinite Scroll: Attention, Empathy, and Entertainment in the Present Tense/ 416 5. 5 Recovery as a Discipline of Attention/ 428 5. 6 Infinite Jest, Genre, and the Ethics of Reading/ 438 CONCLUSIONS/ 450                                                         BIBLIOGRAPHY/ 475