An aspect worth discussing in the analysis of these articles is whether the opinions expressed by their authors could be regarded as authoritative or not, given the subjectivity that characterises their writings. As is further shown, subjectivity is also frequently manifest in non-fiction accounts of 9/11 . The writers who share their views on real-world matters are often respected voices—as is supported by the frequent invitations they receive to comment in the media . However, if one shares attitudes such as the one recently expressed by Terry Eagleton , according to whom ‘writers are condemned to be perpetually disbelieved’ (2003, 90), The Guardian ’s undertaking seems to be doomed to failure, despite (or precisely because of) the celebrity the two novelists enjoy in their home country.
Drawing on a temporal and emotional distinction between the two writing stances—non-fictional/emotional, and, later, fictional/analytical—the present analysis attempts to validate the hypothesis that contemporary fiction rooted in surrounding reality has a participative dimension, taking most of its inspiration from the media . Construing literature as capable of shifting realities through the alternative worlds it creates, Amis’s and McEwan’s fictional works on 9/11 would be more than representational—they would also acquire a participative function.
The first Guardian piece , under the headline ‘Writers on 9/11 ’, is ‘Beyond Belief’ by Ian McEwan , an article probably written while (or soon after) he was watching the news on television . Unanimously acclaimed by critics as one of the most important voices of contemporary British fiction , McEwan also enjoys a wide popular readership, his novels often reaching the bestseller lists. His areas of interest, enumerated by critic Dominic Head, are topical and central to our times: ‘politics , and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical world-view’ (2007, 2). Perhaps his acute sense of contemporaneity and his being a ‘darling’ of the middle-class, liberal English readers of The Guardian were both things its editors had in mind when they opted to publish his opinions on 9/11 . Both articles by Ian McEwan in The Guardian constitute, to varying extents, primary sources for his contribution to 9/11 fiction , the novel Saturday , published in 2005.
‘Beyond Belief’ plunges into the realm of the simulacra and unreal from its first lines, which make reference to two domains of fiction : film and literature . McEwan was definitely not the only one to note the resemblance of the images—seemingly almost frozen for hours and hours on the world’s television screens—to apocalyptic films such as Independence Day, but he was probably the first to bring literature into the discussion: ‘And even the best minds, the best or darkest dreamers of disaster on a gigantic scale, from Tolstoy and Wells to Don DeLillo , could not have delivered us into the nightmare available on television news channels yesterday afternoon’ (2001a). To him (and to the entire Western world), reality was, for a day, transferred to the television screen, and it was nightmarish, horror-like.
McEwan seems unable (or uninterested) to give up the metaphors and dark imagery characterising his early fictional works, such as First Love, Last Rites or The Cement Garden. The events he watched on television were suggestive enough to stir his imagination in the direction of re-creating them in writing. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but surely not if these words have been written by Ian McEwan :The colossal explosions, the fierce black and red clouds, the crowds running through the streets, the contradictory, confusing information, had only the feeblest resemblance to the tinny dramas of Skyscraper, Backdraft or Independence Day. Nothing could have prepared us.
Always, it seemed, it was what we could not see that was so frightening. We saw the skyscrapers, the tilting plane, the awful impact, the cumuli of dust engulfing the streets. But we were left to imagine for ourselves the human terror inside the airliner, down the corridors and elevator lobbies of the stricken buildings, or in the streets below as the towers collapsed on to rescue workers and morning crowds. (2001a, para. 1–2)
In pointing out that television could not properly grasp the horror in its awful plenitude, as it did not show actual deaths (‘We were watching death on an unbelievable scale, but we saw no one die’ (para. 2)), McEwan actually attains something that he might not have intended: making his readers visualise the unseen, ‘the nightmare left in the gulf of imagining’, ‘the horror […] in the distance’ (ibid.). The dimension of the tragedy is further emphasised by his metatextual reference to ancient Greek drama, which also kept death off stage. As McEwan’s fondness for the meta-dimension of writing is notorious, one may speculate that the British writer actually hinted at a degree of fictionalisation in the media coverage, comparable with that on (and off) the ancient stages. The main argument in this respect is the rest of the article, which does not concentrate on the event per se, but on its representation in the media and on the reception of the news —a shameful thirst for information, in his opinion, and one that does not allow the viewer to think about the misery of those who lost loved ones, nor ‘to contemplate the cruelty of the human hearts that could unleash this’:Now my son and I surfed—hungrily, ghoulishly—between CNN , CBC and BBC24. As soon as an expert was called in to pronounce on the politics or the symbolism , we moved on. We only wanted to know what was happening. Numbed, and in a state of sickened wonderment, we wanted only information, new developments—not opinion, analysis, or noble sentiments; not yet. (para. 3)
A similar scene, with a father and a son browsing through the news channels to find raw information, and not expert opinions, is to be found in Saturday (2005, 29–37), following an alleged terrorist attack on London , at the sight of a plane in flames heading towards Heathrow, which was proven afterwards to be only the ‘disappointing’ result of a technical error. Once again, the connection between reality and fiction tightens, this time with the help of the metafictional comments on the media representation of 9/11 , inserted into the media and literary representations of 9/11 produced by McEwan .
Written on 9/11 , ‘Beyond Belief’ may be read, from a psychological perspective, as a result of shock and denial, similar to those feelings affecting the television anchors who unsteadily (hence, unprofessionally) expressed their personal feelings and disbelief regarding what they were showing to a numbed audience made up of billions of people. However, McEwan’s apparent cold-heartedness, his focus on representation, and not on the tragedy itself, may also be an effect of the excessive mediatisation (not mediation) of politics .2
Probably compelled by the shame he admitted feeling at his morbid curiosity with regard to the sight of ‘the world’s mightiest empire in ruins’ (2001a, para. 6), the novelist published, on 15 September, a follow-up article, ‘Only Love, and then Oblivion’, a much more emotional re-evaluation of the events in America . Here, McEwan tries to explain the psychological motivation of people watching news of the tragedies and their need to comment on them. Between shock and fury, there is another psychological state: that of grief. Or, in the more crafted words of the novelist: ‘Emotions have their narrative ; after the shock we move inevitably to the grief’ (2001b, para. 1). Grief is hardly political, despite the existence of some imposed national manifestations (national days of mourning, for example). Grief is personal, which is why McEwan’s take on this overwhelming sentiment focuses on the farewell messages sent by people on the four planes, on the impact the event had upon the bereaved: ‘Each individual death is an explosion in itself, wrecking the lives of those nearest. We were beginning to grasp the human cost. This was what it was always really about’ (para. 5). His assumption, that ‘if the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed’ because ‘it is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim’ (para. 16), seems to anticipate future fictional accounts of the motivation of the terrorists (in De Lillo , Updike and Amis ), although, as I will try to
prove, the latter’s approach to the events and his understanding of the motivations of the Muslim perpetrators could not be more divergent from the idea that the suicidal murderers may have repressed their humane feelings in order to be able to proceed with the massacre.
Martin Amis , another renowned novelist of the same generation as McEwan , and with whom he shares a prominent status as a significant figure in contemporary British fiction , but who has always been—in his writings and more besides—much more radical in his opinions than McEwan, was the next writer to express his views on 9/11 in a piece published by The Guardian . His title, ‘Fear and Loathing’, announces a great departure from McEwan’s view and, at the same time, the attaining of the next stage in the psychology of people stricken by a tragedy : fury. Amis’s authorial presence at this stage should not be so surprising: if Kingsley Amis was an ‘angry novelist’, his son might be labelled a furious one. His opinions on Islamism have been particularly controversial, attracting accusations of racism, which he refuted, by claiming that ‘not only that [he] respect[s] Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad—a unique and luminous historical being’ (2008, 49).3 In other words, he respects Islam , but he can hardly be asked to respect Islamism , ‘a creedal wave that calls out for our elimination’ (50).
With his views and statements, and his literary catalogue comprising two novels on the Holocaust (Time’s Arrow, 1991, and The Zone of Interest, 2014) and two on Stalinism (Koba the Dread, 2002, and House of Meetings, 2006), Amis may be considered a novelist with a pronounced political stance and a postmodernist appetite for historiographic metafiction. It is all the more surprising that he has not written a novel on contemporary history and politics yet, if one considers his publication of a collection of political essays, The Second Plane 2001–2007, which also comprises two short stories, In the Palace of the End (about a fictional son of Saddam Hussein ) and The Last Days of Muhammad Atta , which is part of the literary corpus analysed here. ‘Fear and Loathing’ has been reprinted in the volume mentioned above, under the title ‘The Second Plane’, without any cuts—as the author states in the introductory note, although he is aware that it ‘has a slightly hallucinatory quality (it is fevered by shock and by rumour)’ (2008, ix).4 Notwithstanding this later acknowledgement of his exaggerations, the present subsection examines the tone of the commenters in the aftershock phase.
Amis’s article (whose initial title alludes to the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thomson, a countercultural critique of American values), is much more politically oriented than McEwan’s , its overall discourse having, beyond some inherent elements of literariness (like the abuse of metaphors, for instance), two main purposes: that of demonstrating (by repeating the same argument a few times) that America is hated, and is hated for a reason, and on the other hand, that the Americans are entitled to have their revenge, which he expects to ‘become elephantine’ (2008, 9). He comments on the American nation, whose ‘various national characteristics—self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in Western Europe , an assiduous geographical incuriosity’ (8) has determined its carelessness with regard to whatever may happen beyond its borders, and—at the same time—its unawareness of the fact that its very Americanism is what makes it hated. Rightly noting that ‘terrorism is political communication by other means’ (3), Amis enlarges upon what the attackers wanted to communicate: ‘the message of September 11 ran as follows: America , it is time you learned how implacably you are hated’ (3).
Providing a detailed account of the development of the events, Amis makes the same remark as McEwan a week before him: that the attacks outdid the imagination of any creator of fiction : ‘such a mise en scène would have embarrassed a studio’s executive storyboard or a thriller-writer’s notebook’ (3–4). In addition, Amis is probably the first to look for meanings in the symbolism of the two towers, a discussion which will be later tackled by two contemporary philosophers, Jean Baudrillard and Jürgen Habermas , and also paratextually exploited on the cover of Iain Banks’s Dead Air , Martin Amis ’s The Second Plane and other pieces of 9/11 fiction , such as David Llewellyn’s Eleven. Amis also tries to speculate in the direction of an attack against the entire Christian world, ‘the duo-millennial anniversary of Christianity’ (5); however, this is a path he does not take any further, probably convinced, even at that moment, of the weakness of such an argument.
To Amis , the moment of the crashes is ‘the apotheosis of the postmodern era—the era of images and perceptions’ and ‘an unforgettable metaphor’ (5). Among other aspects that he is one of the first to notice, one may mention the later much-discussed space between the former and the latter crashes, construed by many as a strategy of the terrorists , who wanted ‘to give the world time to gather around its TV sets’ (4), so that everybody could catch the second crash, an act that would ‘torture tens of thousands and terrify hundreds of millions’ (7). Someone less acquainted with Amis’s views on Islamism might sense a kind of admiration for the ‘demented sophistication’ (6) of this deed, which is not the case, as will be later demonstrated. Making reference to the ‘traditional’ enemy of the West , the Soviet Union, Amis mentions the utopian nature of its ideology , which led eventually to its dissolution, although ‘socialism was a modernist, indeed a futurist experiment’ (9). By contrast, he sees Islamists as being ‘convulsed in a late-medieval phase’, implying that hundreds of years may need to pass before they become civilised. To him, the suicidal self-sacrifice of the terrorists is rooted in a religious hysteria which does not have a Western counterpart: ‘Clearly, they have contempt for life. Equally clearly, they have contempt for death ’. This idea will also be advanced in the short story The Last Days of Muhammad Atta , using almost the same phrasing: ‘A peer group piously competitive about suicide […] was a very powerful thing, and the West had no equivalent to it. A peer group for whom death was not death—and life was not life either’ (2008, 116). Amis will later incorporate many concepts and ideas from his non-fictional essays as a starting point for his fiction . This is not because he could take greater liberties in literature , where practically everything may be said under the pretence of being fictional, but because he manages to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction through the subjectivity he displays in both authorial cases.
The Attacks on the WTC in Twenty-First Century Literature
In an age of manipulation through text and image, when television and the internet have seized representation and forwarded it as truth , political fiction struggles to remain a significant conveyor and interpreter of information, attempting to re-establish the supremacy of representation , and hinting at the prevalence of a web of discourses hardly contingent with an actual, non-imposed truth .
An inquiry into the literature written ‘after the fall’ (Gray 2011) reveals striking similarities with that written in the aftermath of the First World War , in terms of attempting trauma resistance through escape from reality and abandonment to fiction . Nonetheless, conveyance of ‘reality ’ is, in most cases, much more anchored in the surrounding reality than it was with the great experimenters of the 1920s and the 1930s. Perhaps this is a consequence of the impact of the media in this age of information: one simply cannot hide from the news , which is why one chooses to incorporate it into fiction and, consequently, to create alternative realities. It is precisely this partial fictionalisation of the events that a whole world has witnessed which renders a significant part of twenty-first century fiction experimental, although the interplay of textual structures and architectures with various writing techniques ‘with a twist’ definitely contributes to deepening the degree of defamiliarisation, even in cases in which, at first glance, what textual evidence provides might seem utterly familiar. In the end, however, ‘due to the fact that a text can never be mistaken for the reality it refers to, literature (as written art) cannot imitate reality directly’ (Praisler 2000, 23). Playing with authority, the objective source of information, s
hould never be an aim of the literary text. Nonetheless, when literature meets journalism and, especially, when it deals with politics without hiding behind various dystopian worlds, the former actually seems to attempt to regain a position long lost in the public sphere : that of a cultural apparatus able to form opinions.
As any momentous event in the world’s history, the tragedy at the WTC has brought forth a plethora of literary productions relating it or rather related to it, so that literary history labelled such works ‘post-9/11 fiction ’, the prefix ‘post-’ being later dropped as irrelevant and superfluous by some critics. This book has also opted for the simplified variant of ‘9/11 fiction ’, agreeing with the opinion of Sascha Pölhmann, who, in a preamble to a chapter dedicated to DeLillo’s Falling Man , considers that ‘the term [post-9/11 fiction ] reveals itself as unfortunate and of limited use at best; it says nothing as a temporal category and, as a critical term, it addresses a body of literature […] too small to merit the all-encompassing usage of the term’ (2010, 52). He is also critical of the imposition of a 9/11 fiction canon. As argued by Tim Gauthier in another recent publication, 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness (2015), this canon has been at least partially established by the influential study Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (Versluys 2009), which addresses five texts ‘that have now become mainstays’ (2015, 15)—namely Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows of the World (2003), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and the graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman . Gauthier believes that ‘any consideration of the fiction written in response to the attacks must at least allude to these texts’ (15, my emphasis), at the same time providing an extended canon which includes Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006) and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008). While it is true that canonicity refers to standards, it also has an imposing nature, which, as Pölhmann remarks, ‘is often accepted all too uncritically’ (2010, 52). The present study is in complete agreement with this latter statement and contests this ‘obligation’ by discussing only two of the texts viewed as compulsory in the assessment of 9/11 fiction (DeLillo’s and McEwan’s ), the others being disregarded mainly for their failing to provide the political and/or media discourse sought according to the general aims of this work. The methodological limitation to Anglo-American literature has unfortunately excluded Beigbeder’s Windows of the World, although the metafictional dimension of the novel , which features a French author, also named Frédéric Beigbeder , who recollects the events of 9/11 while having breakfast in a restaurant on top of the tallest building in Paris , one year later, as well as the express anti-Americanism of the text, would have rendered it perfectly suitable for the aims of this study. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a novel that uses a nine-year-old child whose father died in one of the towers as an extremely unreliable narrator , and which employs Shandean graphic representations of postmodern pretences, has been deemed appropriate only for an analysis geared towards trauma (as is the case with Versluys’s book), or perhaps for laying emphasis on innovations at the level of narrative technique.5
British and American Representations of 9-11 Page 6