British and American Representations of 9-11
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These literary works and many others have drawn the attention of critics, who continue to debate whether such writing should be regarded as postmodernist literature or not. According to the editors of the volume Literature after 9/11 , Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (2008, 2), literature ‘has participated in the larger cultural process of representing and interpreting the events of September 11 2001, while also revealing the difficulties of doing so when cataclysmic events are still so recent’. This recentness is, in their opinion, also accountable for the formal ‘innovations’ in these novels—‘self-reflexive metanarratives, disrupted temporality, multiple viewpoints’ (2008, 4)—although this assessment is questionable: neither of these were invented in the 2000s.
Along the same lines, in the volume The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism, Josh Toth and Neil Brooks mark 9/11 as the shifting point in the literary paradigm:Of course, many might view our locating some shift in the zeitgeist with the fall of the Berlin Wall or any other late twentieth century signifier we might choose as misleading (if not simply erroneous), as the most obvious marker of a new cultural dominant must certainly be the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 and the culture of fear they initiated. […] Quite simply, a culture demanding a shared sense of ‘moral outrage’ doesn’t seem reconcilable with a sustained rejection of metanarratives and a demand for stylistic experimentation. So, indeed, if postmodernism became terminally ill sometime in the late-eighties and early-nineties, it was buried once and for all in the rubble of the World Trade Center. (2007, 3)
It is arguable whether one should even attempt to trace such chronological delimitations when discussing an ideology , a cultural movement or even a literary genre, although the events which the two critics mention are, undoubtedly, carriers of political, ideological and cultural significance, and they have had an overwhelming impact at all levels, including the literary one, as the next sections will try to prove. It would be incautious, however, to ‘bury’ postmodernism in the ashes of the two towers, just as it was imprudent of traditional historians to attempt to delineate historical periods. While Keniston and Follansbee Quinn attribute to these writings formal innovations which are clearly borrowed from twentieth-century literature , Toth and Brooks adopt an opposing view, according to which the same temporal framework is marked by an end of experimentation and a revival of realism, claiming that ‘postmodernism (at least as it was understood in the mid-eighties) has failed’ (2007, 6). These two opinions seem contradictory and, indeed, one cannot truly assert that 9/11 fiction is experimental and self-reflexive, in an attempt to flee from a painful reality, or that it is an entirely a neorealist type of fiction . The fictional works included under this umbrella term are too heterogeneous for such clear-cut distinctions, which is why the analysis of the texts selected here will not be performed holistically, on criteria of literary genres, but rather, as Raymond Williams (2005, 47–9) proposed, as discrete components of a collective mode determined, in this case, by the international political context.
It is, indeed, undeniable that an event with such a symbolic charge as the fall of the two towers was bound to create a momentum in literature as well as in other media . Jürgen Habermas and Jean Baudrillard , among others, insist on its poignant symbolism . The former notes that ‘what was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation’ (2003, 28). The latter observes that ‘the two towers are both a physical, architectural object and a symbolic object (symbolic of financial power and global economic liberalism ). The architectural object was destroyed, but it was the symbolic object which was targeted and which it was intended to demolish’ (2003, 43). As already stated, novelist Martin Amis shared a similar opinion in The Guardian a few days after the attacks:The Pentagon is a symbol, and the WTC is, or was, a symbol, and an American passenger jet is also a symbol—of indigenous mobility and zest, and of the galaxy of glittering destinations. The bringers of Tuesday’s terror were morally ‘barbaric’, inexpiably so, but they brought a demented sophistication to their work. They took these great American artefacts and pestled them together. (2008, 6)
Apart from the symbolism of the target, there is also that of the mysterious and evil Other . All these aspects concur with the rise of this new, contextually dependent literature , much in the way that other , similar aspects led to the many fictionalisations of the Holocaust after the Second World War, famously opposed by Theodor Adorno with his claim that ‘it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz’ (1951, qtd. in Martin 2006, 2). In truth , it is a sensitive subject but, at the same time, there is something cinematic about it, something that contributes to the creation of the illusion of the real. In a recent book dealing with the fiction written after 9/11 , suggestively entitled After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11, Richard Gray , professor of the history of American literature , enlarges upon Habermas’s statement that ‘the whole world population was a benumbed witness’:With 9/11 , that global public was in the unique position of watching the event as it occurred; the impact, the explosion, the fall of the towers were there for all to see in what media people like to call ‘real time’. Not only that, every moment could be replayed, slowed down, speeded up, put in freeze frame or in a wider or narrower perspective: in short, placed under obsessive, compulsive scrutiny. One vital consequence of this, for writers, was that the traumatic moment was also an iconic one. The fall of the towers, as we shall see—and, for that matter, the fall of people from the towers—has become a powerful and variable visual equivalent for other kinds of fall. (2011, 7, my emphasis)
Gray’s account of the media exposure of the event is reminiscent of the analyses practised in the domain of film studies. Many declared, after watching the fall of the towers on television , that they thought they were watching an apocalyptic film . Furthermore, the event has been transferred to the sphere of hyperreality. It was iconised, as the critic remarks, but it was also fictionalised. It is probably the first example of instant fictionalisation of actual events. As has already been stated, the narrative of 9/11 was practically written in the newsrooms of the world by the editors of ‘breaking news’. What the novelists did afterwards was simply to intertextually embed this narrative into their stories.
The Americans were not the only ones to have tackled 9/11 in their narratives , but this fact is accountable on the grounds of historical facts and consequences of the event at the global level. In Tony Blair’s words:Round the world, 11 September is bringing Governments and people to reflect, consider and change. And in this process, amidst all the talk of war and action, there is another dimension appearing. There is a coming together. The power of community is asserting itself. We are realising how fragile are our frontiers in the face of the world’s new challenges. Today conflicts rarely stay within national boundaries. (2 October 2001)
A traditional ally , the United Kingdom joined the Americans in their ‘holy war’ against terrorism , exposing its citizens to a similar attack that was to strike London in 2005. The speech of the British prime minister (in office at that time), Tony Blair , carries overtones strikingly resembling Bush ’s previous ‘calls to arms’: ‘an act of evil’, ‘the shadow of evil’, ‘savagery of the fanatic’, ‘cruelty beyond comprehension’, ‘bloodlust’ and so on (2001). His attempt to make people understand that Islam is not terrorism is lost in a sea of buzzwords.We do not act against Islam . The true followers of Islam are our brothers and sisters in this struggle. Bin Laden is no more obedient to the proper teaching of the Koran than those Crusaders of the 12th century who pillaged and murdered, represented the teaching of the Gospel. It is time the West confronted its ignorance of Islam . Jews, Muslims and Christians are all children of Abraham. (2001, my emphasis)
In this context , contemporary fiction provides an unsurprising array of literary representations of 9/11 and
of its effects on the global stage. It is rather difficult not to find political discourses at work in the writing of some of the most renowned male British novelists of today, such as Martin Amis , Ian McEwan or Jonathan Coe, to name but a few. Political awareness and engagement within the literary text seem to spring from what Salman Rushdie terms ‘a culture of offendedness’ (Jones, The Independent , 10 August 2013), from the writers’ need to get involved as authoritative voices, or, perhaps, as a counter-reaction to the fuzzy and slippery metanarratives of postmodern fiction . The demarcation proposed draws on a temporal distinction between the literary works that feature the day of the attacks and those that concentrate on subsequent global developments, in terms of international affairs, alliances, political statements and, eventually, war. From a political and journalistic perspective, one may posit that the statements (articles, television broadcasts and so on) and even the decisions made on 9/11 or a few days after the event were much more dominated by emotional factors (ranging from trauma and fear to rage), whereas those made some time after tend to be more cerebral and analytical. With regard to reality/fiction, this demarcation line also draws on a spatial distinction—the closer to the event, the more emotional, the farther, the more detached, as the following chapters will strive to prove.
As far as the structure and narrative technique of these new novels is concerned, they clearly bear the burden of having to update past writing techniques so as to suit contemporary tastes and, more than anything else, to sell copies. One should not forget that the world has entered the postindustrial era, a time when selling is everything and everything is for sale. Furthermore, the book and interactive media have been competing for supremacy for some time, and the former seems to be losing. Either explicitly political, expressing viewpoints on the attacks through techniques which borrow directly from the mass media, or focusing on identity crises generated by trauma , the writings under discussion here—some of them written by very famous men in contemporary literature , such as Don DeLillo , Philip Roth, John Updike , Thomas Pynchon , Ian McEwan , Martin Amis and so on—hark back a century or more to the Experimentalists (trying to ‘write’ themselves and their surrounding reality in a manner equally unusual and linguistically challenging compared to that employed by their forerunners). It seems increasingly hard for young novelists and playwrights to produce a truly original piece of writing. Thus, in turn, they look back (in resignation) and replicate, over and over again, Burroughs, Kerouac and other beatniks, or le nouveau roman, or Joyce … or whoever may still keep the reader’s attention through imaginative techniques which do not necessarily presuppose plots, actions, temporal order, beginnings, endings, typologies of characters , ‘literary language’ or anything else that a ‘traditional’ novel might make use of in order to recreate, imitate or reflect reality. The difference often lies in political engagement, as many twenty-first century novelists have been transformed into war journalists by the turn of events on the stage of international politics —which is not to say that they are all new Hemingways, but that they have developed a form of counteraction to the media feeds which impart information into the public sphere . In other words, behind textual innovation and its numerous intricacies lies a need for communication and reality (or actuality, or factuality).
However, it is necessary to reinforce the idea that, despite this apparent thirst for reality , despite this engagement of contemporary authors with what is customarily perceived as immediate reality , and despite the incorporation of facts into fiction , one should not fall into the trap of construing contemporary fiction as a pseudo-journalistic account of a predetermined historical reality . In the end, no matter how much narrative techniques might evolve, no matter how far reality is processed into a piece of fiction which may seem real, or at least realistic, there is a paradigm that has remained unchanged since the early days of fiction : it does not present realities. It creates alternative words and, in so doing, it might resort to re-presenting and to incorporating elements belonging to politics , the media and the public sphere . Clearly, neither should opinions deriving from the spheres of communication that have been discussed be taken for granted as the absolute truth and reality .
Conclusions
Instead of focusing on the hypothesis that discourse has manipulative means and ends (something that has long been a truism), this chapter has striven to depict the element of fictionality in political and media discourse , its aim being not to destabilise their credibility as sources of information, but simply to create a bridge between the communicational spheres in focus: the so-called objective discourses based on facts versus subjective literature . To put it otherwise, while fiction can never be considered reality , reality can be altered through discourse and can, consequently, acquire a certain degree of fictionality . ‘Inasmuch as fact and fiction are opposites’, David Lodge says, ‘the novel as a literary form is founded upon contradiction, upon the reconciliation of the irreconcilable’ (1996, 28). However, he admits the immersion of the real into the imaginary, though carefully concealed behind ‘defensive manoeuvre[s] to disclaim any representation of real people and institutions’ (28). The purpose of this section was to demonstrate a converse view: the real may be inserted in fiction in various forms, but fiction may be also inserted to the same extent in a presupposed rendition of reality . The next logical step is to look into the ‘fictional mirror’ in order to find out how the literary representations of the same moments manage to reconcile their obvious resort to reality and facts with the inarguable notion that fiction can never be taken for truth and reality.
References
ABC 9/11 Live Broadcast. 2001. At September 11 Television Archive. Available from https://archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive. Accessed 19 Apr 2014.
Amis, Martin. 2001. Fear and Loathing. The Guardian, 18 September. Reprinted as ‘The Second Plane’ in M. Amis (2008) The Second Plane. September 11: 2001–2007, 3–10. London: Jonathan Cape.
Banks, Iain. 2002. Dead Air. London: QPD.
Baudrillard, Jean, and Chris Turner. 2003. The Spirit of Terrorism. New York: Verso.
BBC News. 2003. Anti-war Rally Makes Its Mark. BBC World News, 19 February. Available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2767761.stm. Accessed 31 Aug 2014.
BBC World News 9/11 Live Broadcast. 2001. September 11 Television Archive. Available from https://archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive. Accessed 19 Apr 2014.
Bin Laden, Osama and World Islamic Front. 1998. Fatwa, February 23. English Translation Available from http://fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm. Accessed 28 Aug 2014.
Blair, Tony. 2001. Leader’s Speech, Brighton 2001. Available from http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=186. Accessed 19 Sept 2014.
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Borradori, Giovanna, and Jürgen Habermas. 2003. Fundamentalism and Terror. A Dialogue with Jürgen Habermas. In Philosophy in a Time of Terror, ed. Giovanna Borradori, 25–43. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brooks, Neil, and Josh Toth. 2007. The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism. New York/Amsterdam: Rodopi.