Globalizing a narrative

On September 11 2013 something (minor) happened: I understood what it means to "globalize" and why it's important to globalize stories.

The term globalization, despite having degenerated to a one-size-fits-all word that is used loosely in academic and non-academic circles, fundamentally refers to a dynamic process of integration--of the world.

So does its verb form "globalize"; to "globalize" would mean to include those that had been previously excluded, especially in stories.

On the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, prime time Television did its level best to remind us that the story of the event hasn't been fully globalized yet.

I realized this in the course of a conversation I had with my mother, who was watching an NBC-produced recreation, a sort of a documentary, if you will, of the attacks.

I observed the repetitiousness of it all and wished there were some fresh interpretations.

My mother said, "but this really happened; they're showing actually what happened that day."

She was referring to the twin stories of heroism on the part of the ordinary American citizens who were on board American Airlines flight 11 and United flight 93, respectively.

"There is more to the story," I said, than just the attack and the act of valiance on the part of the victims.

What more can be said, my mother pondered.

Why, what about the perspective of the attackers?

My mother was taken a bit aback; how can attackers have a story? They are just attackers.

I launched into a mini-spiel on how an event, especially historical one's have many actors and to give a realistic picture of the event, all perspectives need to be included and maybe then the event will look less like a sentimental and one-sided leaf out of a mythology of saints and sinners and more like what it is--a historical event that is the culmination of a complex chain of causes and effects.

My mother gamely listened to my spiel and was half in accord with me.

To "globalize" the story of 9/11 is to make room for the perspectives and voices of those whose perspectives and voices have been excised, i.e. those of the "attackers."

By extension, to globalize any narrative would be to extend the courtesy of this accommodation, to integrate as it were, stuff that had been left out when they were constructed in a unipolar world.

The multipolar world order demands nothing short of globalized stories; stories told the same way sound jarring and parochial.

Master of the Paranoid Art

An Illustration of Thomas Pynchon's "Bleeding Edge"

Thomas Pynchon writes his new novel to give a novel interpretation of the "war on terror," a war that commenced with the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

I'll let Jonathan Lethem's evocative review of the book do the telling of what Pynchon's Bleeding Edge is about and how it's remarkably about what it's about.

Bleeding Edge is a masterpiece of Paranoid Art, which accomplishes what according to Lethem, Complacent Art chooses to avoid:

Paranoid art knows the more terrifying (and inevitable) discoveries are further questions. Paranoid art traffics in interpretation, and beckons interpretation from its audience; it distrusts even itself, and so becomes the urgent opposite of complacent art.

 Pynchon offers no monstrously simple answer to the question of the attacks on America. An answer to "Why it happened?" is looped back into "Modernity.":

In Pynchon’s view, modernity’s systems of liberation and enlightenment — railway and post, the Internet, etc. — perpetually collapse into capitalism’s Black Iron Prison of enclosure, monopoly and surveillance. The rolling frontier (or bleeding edge) of this collapse is where we persistently and helplessly live. His characters take sustenance on what scraps of freedom fall from the conveyor belt of this ruthless conversion machine, like the house cat at home in the butcher’s shop. In Joyce’s formulation, history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. For Pynchon, history is a nightmare within which we must become lucid dreamers.

 Another review of the novel can be found here.