Oana-Celia Gheorghiu
British and American Representations of 9/11
Literature, Politics and the Media
Oana-Celia Gheorghiu“Dunărea de Jos” University, Galati, Romania
ISBN 978-3-319-75249-5e-ISBN 978-3-319-75250-1
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75250-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933271
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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Cover illustration: Artwork by Sergiu Mitrofan, included in the cover artwork of the album Eternal Return, Universal Romania, 2015.
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Acknowledgements
I would never find the right words to express my gratitude to Professor Michaela Praisler, a true inspiration to me during my postgraduate years and beyond. I would also like to thank my dear friend Gabriela Colipcă-Ciobanu. This book would have never taken shape without her support. Many thanks also to my friends Catalina Neculai, Mihaela Ifrim, Andreea Răileanu and Irina Rață for their constant encouragement.
Thanks to the Department of English of the Faculty of Letters, ‘Dunărea de Jos’ University of Galati, Romania, for providing the framework required for my academic development.
I am greatly indebted to Sergiu Mitrofan, artist extraordinaire, for allowing me to use his collage. As someone once said, it is as if he made it after reading my book or as if his art sparked my interest in the theme. While this is not true, it is undeniable that his image is the best cover this book could have.
This book is dedicated to my husband, Dragoș, who has constantly been there for me. Countless ideas in this book are the result of our endless conversations.
Draft versions of some parts of this book have been previously published in various journals, as follows:
Chapter 2 , section The Post-Traumatic Shock in the Press— Gheorghiu, Oana. 2014. ‘British Creators of Fiction Facing Reality on September 11, 2001.’ In Michaela Praisler, Oana Gheorghiu et al. (eds.), Cultural Intertexts , 1–2/2014, Cluj Napoca: Casa Cărții de Știință.
Chapter 3 , section The Rest is Silence: September 11— Gheorghiu, Oana. 2014. ‘The Ultimate Other of the Twenty-First Century. The Muslim Terrorist in the Media and Contemporary Fiction.’ In Iulian Boldea (ed.) Communication, Context, Interdisciplinarity . vol. 3/2014. Tîrgu Mures: Petru Maior University Press.
Chapter 3 , section The West Strikes Back—Representations of the War on Terror— Gheorghiu, Oana. 2016. ‘Documentary Theatre as Dissidence. Textuality of World Politics in David Hare’s History Play Stuff Happens .’ In Michaela Praisler, Oana Gheorghiu et al. (eds.), Cultural Intertexts , 6/2016, Cluj Napoca: Casa Casa Cărții de Știință.
Chapter 4 , section Anti-Americanism as Realism in Iain Banks’s Dead Air— Gheorghiu, Oana, Stan Steluţa. 2015. 9/11, Politics and International Relations in the (Fictional) Public Sphere. In Simona Antofi (ed.) Communication Interculturelle et Littérature vol. 21 nr. 2/2015, Cluj Napoca: Casa Casa Cărții de Știință.
Chapter 5 , sections The Theory of ‘Islamismophobia’ in Literary Practice: ‘We Respect Muhammad, We Don’t Respect Muhammad Atta’ and Breaking into the Western World: Don DeLillo’s Falling Muslim Men —Gheorghiu, Oana. 2016. ‘Extreme Otherness. Representations of Otherness in Two Anglo-American Writers’ in Journal of Intercultural Inquiry , vol. 2(1) 2016. University of Sunderland.
Chapter 5 , sections Societal Control Mechanisms; Post 9/11 Islamophobia ; and The Theory of ‘Islamismophobia’ in Literary Practice: ‘We Respect Muhammad, We Don’t Respect Muhammad Atta’ —Ilieș (Gheorghiu), Oana. 2014. ‘In Their Defense. Fictional Voices of Otherness in the September-Eleven Context.’ Philologica Jassyensia Supplement , year X, no 1(19) 2014, ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza,’ University of Iasi.
This research was partially supported by Sectorial Operational Programme Human Resources Development 2007–2013 Perform — Sustainable Performance in Doctoral and Postdoctoral Research SOP HRD 159/1.5/S/138963.
Abbreviations
9/11September 11, 2001
9/11 CR The 9/11 Commission Report
DA Iain Banks, Dead Air
FM Don DeLillo, Falling Man
NYT The New York Times
RF Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
RuinsDon DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’
S Ian McEwan, Saturday
SH David Hare, Stuff Happens
TLD Martin Amis, The Last Days of Muhammad Atta
WTCWorld Trade Center
Contents
1 Introduction: Towards Another Reading of 9/11 Neorealist Fiction
Part I Encoding 9/11 in the Media and the Literary Text
2 Making History: Politics, the Media and Literature in the Twenty-First Century
3 Literary Rewritings of History and Politics After 9/11
Part II Ideological Reconfigurations of Identity in the Literary Representations of 9/11
4 The Shattered Self of the West
5 Extreme Otherness: ‘The Muslim Menace’
6 Afterthoughts
Annexes
Index
© The Author(s) 2018
Oana-Celia GheorghiuBritish and American Representations of 9/11https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75250-1_1
1. Introduction: Towards Another Reading of 9/11 Neorealist Fiction
Oana-Celia Gheorghiu1
(1)“Dunărea de Jos” University, Galati, Romania
On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, many televisions across the world broadcast that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. It looked like a scene from an apocalyptic thriller at first, before the sudden realisation that the yellow band with the words BREAKING NEWS on it was suggesting—no, was shouting out loud—that everything was REAL. The image of the two towers going down in flames haunted me for a long time, then was buried somewhere, in a corner of my unconscious, resurfacing at the yearly anniversaries of the event and, rather unexpectedly, ten years later, during an academic lecture on postmodern literature , when a novel ‘about 9/11 ’ was mentioned in passing. So, they are writing fiction about that now? I asked myself. Indeed they are—dozens, even hundreds of books, as I later found out. Preliminary research by Dawes has documente
d approximately 250 fictional pieces related to 9/11, two thirds of which are written by American authors (2011, qtd. in Gauthier 2015, 19). The same research brought forth the idea that the events of 9/11 left many other people with the impression that they were watching a film that surpassed the imagination of any ambitious Hollywood scriptwriter. Philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida , Jean Baudrillard , Jürgen Habermas , or novelists, such as Don DeLillo or Ian McEwan , described the events by starting with their unreality, their eerie resemblance to a feature film , and their metaphorical and symbolic nature. It seemed reasonable, then, that an event so surrounded by an aura of fictionality and yet so very real, and with such serious consequences at the level of global geopolitics could draw the attention of the creators of fiction , while also remaining a major topic for politicians and journalists. Has fiction settled into the postmodern pastiche of political and media discourses, incorporating them by creating alternative worlds? Or did it have the ambition to join them on an equal footing, to add its insights into what was becoming more and more unreal and representational?
Perhaps, as many people note, fiction has assumed a cathartic role in its dealing with trauma induced by the real, embracing it and making it resonant of the painful reality lived by the survivors or families of the victims (DeLillo , Foer, Waldman), keeping it at bay and focusing on the macro consequences of the event (McEwan , Hamid ), and even confronting it through sarcasm and dark humour (Beigbeder, Banks ). Whatever the road taken, trauma seems to be the common denominator for 9/11 fiction : it is its binding element that qualifies it for intricate psychological and psychoanalytical assessment. Many critical opinions expressed in the years since the event tend towards the idea that 9/11 is unrepresentable due to its magnitude, because ‘we do not yet know how to qualify … we do not know what we are talking about’ (Borradori and Derrida 2003, 86). Therefore, focus is laid on what remains safely representable: the smaller, far less significant scale of personal trauma . Literature itself has put criticism on this track by choosing to foreground the personal, rather than the political. However, this is not all, for fiction is deceptive by definition. Yet its deceit gives way to a long list of trauma-oriented critical analyses, complemented sometimes with elements of postmodern theory and chronotopes, or with more conventional genre theory. Without attempting to write an exhaustive literature review, a few titles have been selected for a brief presentation, with a view to continuing their tradition, while also filling the gaps possibly left by their approach. A good case in point is the eclectic collection of articles brought together under the title Literature After 9/11 (Routledge) by editors Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. Essentially, the papers included in this volume discuss the role of literature in representing the unrepresentable, and especially in ‘offering critiques of and challenges to political discourses that seek to simplify or fix the meaning of 9/11 ’ (2008, 3). The book covers novels, essays, poetry and personal reminiscences, including the famous ‘Portraits of Grief’ (the collection of 9/11 obituaries published by The New York Times ), anticipating, yet not convincingly pinpointing the relation between fiction and non-fiction in the representation of 9/11. An intricate analysis focusing on the novel from the sole perspective of trauma studies is Kristiaan Versluys’s Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (Columbia University Press). It sets out from the premise that ‘the best 9/11 novels are diffident linguistically’ and that ‘as an event, 9/11 is limned as a silhouette, expressible only through allegory and indirection’ (2009, 13). Aside from its psychoanalytical insights, the study provides, under Derrida’s influence, a valuable account of the language used to represent, once again, the unrepresentable. The traumatic route imagined by Versluys for his book is better represented by Art Spiegelman’s comics In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) than by the novels of Foer and DeLillo , because, he argues, the author is a first-hand witness of the event, which makes his fictionalised/drawn trauma more cogent than that of people writing from a safe distance. Trauma decreases in intensity in the novels analysed towards the end of Versluys’s book. The fifth chapter focuses on the representation of otherness , acknowledging that ‘the immediate shock has worn off and … the concerns expressed will be less directly related to the experience of trauma ’ (183) as time has passed. Versluys’s book is undoubtedly a mainstay of the critical reception of 9/11 fiction , one that has created and imposed a canon of this subgenre in the making, and yet, its approach and the author’s belief in the healing powers of the narrative leave some things unsaid—fortunately so, because it allows other researchers to follow in its footsteps and complement its evaluations. One of them is Tim Gauthier, who in 2015 published 9/11 Fiction, Empathy and Otherness (Lexington Books). His focus, obvious from the title, shifts from what one feels (including trauma ) to how one perceives what the other feels, in other words, on empathy, arguing that ‘fiction presents opportunities to witness empathy in action—in the text’s very attempts to represent the inner lives of its diverse characters… and in the reader’s recognition of her own empathetic efforts at connecting (or not) with the characters presented in the book’ (2015, 32). Gauthier makes an articulate case for the understanding of otherness , proposing a reading which emphasises that 9/11 ‘highlighted our condition of togetherness at the same time that it put into relief the difficulty of negotiating issues of difference highlighted within these conditions’ (44), which is in agreement with some of the ideas expressed below.
Also close to the intentions of this book is Cara Cilano’s From Solidarity to Schism—9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the US (Rodopi 2009), a volume aiming to show how the events of 9/11 and their aftermath affect cultural practice at the world level, laying emphasis on ‘how different peoples and cultures may represent and understand their post-9/11 worlds in non-US centred ways’ (2009, 17). It brings under the lens literary works and films from Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Germany, Israel, Iran and Pakistan. Another thorough critical response to 9/11 fiction to which the present study acknowledges its debt is provided by Martin Randall in 9/11 and the Literature of Terror (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Aside from focusing on the works of Frédéric Beigbeder , Don DeLillo , Ian McEwan and Martin Amis , who are constantly referred to whenever a critical work on 9/11 fiction is published , Randall is among the first to foreground the Other’s voice in discussing Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s monologic novel , The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). The volume also features analyses of a film , Man on Wire (2008), and two plays, The Mercy Seat by Neil Labute (2002) and The Guys by Anne Nelson (2001), and of Simon Armitage’s emotional film-poem Out of the Blue (2006), one of the few literary texts that venture to give a voice to the victims trapped inside the towers (aside from Beigbeder’s literary ‘minute-by-minute report’ in Windows of the World).
Among the most comprehensive critical works in the field is Richard Gray’s After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (Blackwell, 2011). As is apparent from the title, the volume does not focus on 9/11 fiction but on the way in which the event has changed paradigms in literature (mostly prose, although he also dedicates a chapter to drama and poetry), much in the way other similarly dramatic events in the history of the United States did in their time. Alongside Gray , I contend that the events of 9/11 , whose traumatic implications cannot be denied, are relevant for the United States’ historical self-assessment. Their displacement from the streets of Manhattan to Fiction Avenue is bound to provide the critic with an array of evaluation tools more relevant to the political ‘ways of the world’, instead of settling for psychological insights into the thoughts and sensations experienced by immediate witnesses of the catastrophe. It can be asserted, therefore, that the critical bibliography of 9/11 literature , with its obsessive plunging into trauma , suffers from its disregard of the bigger picture, and that an attempt to ‘liquidate this lack’ (Propp 1997, 173) may constitute an enrichment of this still nascent field.
The method envisaged does not exclude
occasional references to trauma or to the tenets of postmodernism , still characteristic of 9/11 fiction —whether or not the movement is considered dead and buried (either in the ashes of the World Trade Center , as some say, or under the debris of the Berlin Wall, as others propose). The famous postmodernist mistrust of grand narratives is very much present in 9/11 fiction , and so are intertextuality , fragmentation, the unreliability of the narrative/narrator and the meta-dimension. For example, looking into 9/11 fiction by Don DeLillo or by the undisputable ‘grand magus’ of American postmodernism, Thomas Pynchon , one could include them in the broad, welcoming category of postmodern literature and just leave it at that. But something would still be missing because, as Catherine Morley observes, ‘what many writers have also been integrating into their fiction has been the American response to the attacks: the perceived infringement of civil liberties, surveillance, the institution of a climate of fear, the renewed Cold War rhetoric of good versus evil, and the seemingly overnight proliferation of acronyms and governmental institutions and bodies with the primary strategic aim of waging a war on terror ’ (2008, 82). Such topics, prevalent at the level of the literary text, may determine the assertion of fiction as aiming to join the other instances of textualisation of the real/reality , up to the point at which it becomes a tool for manipulation /intoxication/subversion. It can be said that literature has entered the realm of discourse with almost as much impact as any other text type. The literature of today requires inclusion in a web of texts and discourses which at the same time reflect and alter reality . This is the main argument suggesting the return of literature to realism, which affects even postmodernists like DeLillo , as well as younger writers such as Foer , and which can be adequately applied to 9/11 fiction in general. The realism at work in twenty-first century fiction has not much to do with the authoritative, omniscient Victorian one, although bold rebuttals of the poststructuralist denial of authorship as authority do exist. Rather, it is manifest in ‘the new way of imagining literary and political futures in a world increasingly lacking the clear-cut lines along which politics , history and capitalism can be imagined’ (Anjaria 2017). It seems to be anchored in the ‘post-theoretical environment’ (Habib 2005, 772) which has already been termed post-postmodernism . It certainly looks like every post has its post these days, which cries out for more imaginative coinages in the field. As a matter of fact, this does seem to be a concern of present-day scholars. In an article entitled ‘Post-Postmodernism: An Ugly Wor(l)d’, Pia Brînzeu sets out on a quest for a new, more appropriate name for the cultural reality of the twenty-first century, proposing a few alternatives: transmodernism, hypermodernism, automodernism, digimodernism, altermodernism, metamodernism or simply remodernism (2015, 39–40). Irrespective of the term which will eventually impose itself (one of the above or something completely innovative), it is important to construe ‘cultural logic’ as ‘a new form of enlightenment’ (40) which, in the new economic, cultural and political context , synthesises modernism and postmodernism with the pre-modern realities that contribute with realism to the new paradigm.
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