Gravity’s Rainbow Domination and Freedom by Luc Herman, Steven Weisenburger (review)
Chapters 4 and 5 move from the multicultural literature of the previous chapter to transnational literature. In a highly original contribution, chapter 4 looks at the "Balkanization of 9/11" (207) in Aleksander Hemon's The Lazarus Project and Pat Barker's Double Vision, two texts that situate 9/11 within the history, aesthetics, and narrative ethics of the Bosnian War. Chapter 5 turns to the discourse of a transnational "surveillance economy" (255) and its reversal of what Banita identifies as ethical spectatorship in chapter 1: whereas the literature analyzed in the latter is directed toward "seeing and responding to images of pain," the former "are all about being seen" (252). The works of Walter Kirn, Jonathan Raban, William Gibson, Richard Flanagan, and Lorraine Adams speak to this notion of visibility as it relates to questions of control, authority, identity, and belonging. What makes these texts collectively unique from the Orwellian and Foucauldian panoptic society that preceded the September 11 attacks, Banita argues, is the permeability of "domestic crime fighting and global warfare" (Shapiro qtd. in Banita 258), or the transnational capacity of surveillance culture in the post-9/11 moment. All in all, Plotting Justice makes a positive contribution to the discourse of post-9/11 fiction, filling a scholarly gap first engaged by Kristiaan Versluys and Richard Gray. While the former asked for an engagement of poethics (poetic ethics) and the latter pushed for greater engagement with the Other, Banita extends both projects by expanding the canon and articulating a breadth of ethical themes. Unlike its predecessors, though, Plotting Justice brooks no definitive stances that might open it up to criticism of prescriptiveness. It remains a panoramic survey rather than a codified argument. As such, it may be easy to find oneself lost in the constantly multiplying ethical alternatives proposed, but this is a feature, not a bug; all the better to prompt ethical engagement in her readers.