제니퍼 이건의 『폭력단의 방문』에 나타난 9/11과 포스트모던적 구원

Abstract

This paper analyzes Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad, the pathbreaking 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner known for its innovative narrative devices such as a chapter entirely composed of PowerPoint slides. While the novel’s experiment on narrative conventions and how this intersects with postmodern notions of time have been well-noted, its underlying themes of convalescence and redemption in lieu of post 9-11 have not been rigorously examined by previous scholarship. Taking a cue from the novel’s valorization of gaps and pauses in Rock’N’Roll songs as well as in one’s life, this essay takes aim at pronouncements of postmodern redemption thematized in Egan’s narrative. I draw on this conceptualization of postmodern redemption and more particularly the formulations of “end” frequently featured in the novel as a corollary for post 9-11 America’s fascination with its own demise. In the context of the spectacular violence of 9-11 and the rise of big data and government surveillance, the fear of “the end” is manifest in A Visit from the Goon Squad. I argue that the discursive displacement of that fear onto the fear of becoming a “has–been” in people in music industry highlighted in the novel indexes the impress of the end of American century and the postmodern anxiety about being a latecomer. Reading the novel alongside contemporary debates over agency and identity politics, I will show how the pervasive tropes of pauses and gaps unfolded in the novel conceptualize redemptive notion of time, as they prompt the reader to reconstruct the fractured past of the main characters. In the final section of the paper, I relate that analysis to Rita Felski’s idea of “attachment” which is inspired by Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory to contemplate upon the unexpected agency and solidarity that it affords us, which transcends divisive identity politics in the post 9-11 US.