British and American Representations of 9-11

by Oana-Celia Gheorghiu

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The World Trade Center? Isn’t that -?’

  ‘A plane? What, a big plane, like a Jumbo or something?’

  ‘You mean, like, the two big, um, skyscrapers?’ (DA 23)

  Just as in the real world—which points once again in the direction of an assumed realism—the actual information comes from the one-directional means of communication that is television: ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll put the TV on…’ (23).

  The next chapter is set some days after the event, and expresses the full force of rage against the terrorist perpetrators. As any civilised and humane person, Ken Nott disapproves of the atrocity that took the lives of 3000 civilians on the morning of 9/11, and expresses himself openly in favour of revenge:If you do find and kill Bin Laden, assuming he is the piece of scum behind this, or even if you just find his body… […] Wrap him in pigskin and bury him under Fort Knox. I can even tell you how deep: thirteen hundred and fifty feet. That’s one hundred and ten storeys. […] oh, one last thing: as it stands, what happened last week wasn’t an attack on democracy; if it was they’d have crashed a plane into Al Gore’s house. (DA 30)

  What is relevant is that this fictional journalist takes into consideration the possibility that Bin Laden might not have been behind the attacks. In general, the political leaders and their speaking trumpet, the written or audio-visual media , did not even consider such a possibility. This is a first signal that the character will stand against the official discourse on every occasion. After bringing into discussion Fort Knox, one of the most important military bases of America (and a symbol of impregnable authority), and alluding to the approximate height of the two collapsed towers, Ken Nott openly attacks the American administration with his reference to Al Gore, former vice-president during Bill Clinton’s mandate . In his view, the Democrat politician represents American democracy, thus implying that the incumbent Republican administration does not.

  As if inspired by Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, the events at the WTC are rapidly transferred from reality (‘It’s Pearl Harbor II. They’ll fucking nuke Baghdad!’ (DA 31)) into hyperreality. Baudrillard noted that ‘in a violent and contemporary period of history […], it is myth that invades cinema as imaginary content. […]. Myth, chased from the real by the violence of history, finds refuge in cinema’ (1994, 43). Banks casts the immediate reality in the world of cinema and transforms it into myth:‘Where’s Superman? Where’s Batman? Where’s Spiderman?’ ‘Where’s Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise, or Arnie, or Stallone?’ ‘The barbarians have seized the narrative .’ ‘Fuck, the bad guys are re-writing the scripts…! Challenger and Chernobyl were SF, Aum Shinrikyo and the Tokyo Underground was manga; this is a disaster movie directed by Satan’. (DA 47)

  The cultural reference to American superheroes and Hollywood actors of action films, and the mention of a script of a disaster movie seem to imply that there is something unreal or, at least, not-so-real about the 9/11 events. The questions hint ironically at the myth of American invincibility and superpower , a myth inculcated by the media and proved false on 9/11. Past tragedies, like the Challenger space shuttle disintegration (1986), the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl (1986) or the sarin attack on the Tokyo underground (1995), have already entered the category of myth with the passing of time. Interestingly enough, they are associated with simulacra specific to the nature of the events: science fiction in the first two cases, and manga (Japanese comics) in the case of the latter. The attacks on the WTC, the most recent narrative , are associated with disaster movies and, therefore, regarded as simulation of the real. Satan, as director of this film, may be a product of the political discourse and the mass media which repeatedly used the word evil in their texts, as shown above.

  Ken Nott is constructed as a realistic representation of a European who is less ready to mourn alongside Americans for the death of the 3000 people at the WTC, the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. He feels entitled, as a political journalist , to comment upon political decisions made at the highest level, and to cast the blame on the American administration for the tragedy that hit their country. Unlike the American writers who integrated the 9/11 tragedy into their fiction (such as DeLillo in Falling Man, and Safran Foer in Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close), Banks seems unaffected by trauma . Consequently, his narrator is able to provide a more detached interpretation of the events, either by hinting at various conspiracy theories that were to make up the content of the alternative media in the following years (‘the September eleventh attacks were organised by the International Zionist Conspiracy to discredit Islam and give Sharon carte blanche against the Palestinians’ (DA 54), or by casting the blame for the attacks on the American government itself: ‘but don’t forget you helped put them there; you funded the Mujahidin and you armed Bin Laden and supported the Pakistani security service, like you once supported the dictator Saddam Hussein because you needed him’ (DA 71). If the former statement has remained, up to this point, just in the permissive sphere of conspiracy theories, where basically anything can be asserted, when it comes to the latter, the accusations are grounded in the universal knowledge of the facts mentioned, though it is true that Americans are not so eager to bring them into discussions of 9/11.

  All Ken Nott’s statements, whether on air or in private conversation, lead in the same direction as far as 9/11 is concerned: the terrorists should be punished, yet not by resorting to a war against the entire region from where they came, and America is almost as guilty of the death of the 3000 innocent people as the perpetrators themselves. One may note a certain resemblance to Martin Amis’s article analysed in Chap. 2, which may be indicative of the fact that this might have been a common perspective of the British at that time.

  Nott’s fellow characters are not endowed with much ‘character’ of their own, and seem to have been constructed only to ensure the barely disguised authorial voice plenty of conversation partners for his political rants. However, one may note Phil’s (Ken’s colleague at the radio) opinion on the matter, which has since proved perfectly accurate: ‘Major rethink on format after the events of September the eleventh […] What a brilliant excuse that’s turned out to be, for so many things!’ (DA 128). While in the first sentence the character refers only to the media , it is clear, judging by the second sentence (and by looking around, but this goes without saying), that 9/11 had such an impact on the entire Western world, that, despite the little empathy the Europeans felt for the Americans , their collective identity was also altered by the changes effected by the violent process of ‘reinstating democracy in the Middle East’, also known as the ‘war on terror’.

  In Europe , 9/11 has never had the impact it did on the other side of the Atlantic, although it was influential at the level of foreign policy, in that it was to inveigle the European signatories of the NATO treaty into wars that were theirs only inasmuch as one could regard the attacks as an assault on democracy and on Western civilisation , and not as one on America alone. It is not our aim to discuss this here, as it would divert the argument too much from the scope of the study, making it more political and less literary oriented (than it already is). However, the analysis of the novel selected as illustrative of the fictional representation of the events of 9/11 has revealed the fact that it does not focus on the event per se, leaving it in the background. The neorealism at work in Dead Air breaks with the rules of traditional realism, resembling (only to a limited extent, it is true) historiographic metafiction by its challenging the notion of historical truth . Partly re-presenting various hypotheses and speculations that have surrounded the attacks on the WTC since day one, with that carelessness of the novelist who knows that fiction is (or should be) a censorship-free area, and partly resorting to the media (therefore re-representing their representations ), Dead Air manages to push the reality of the event to the margins of the collective conscience, bringing to the foreground identities ineluctably caught in the game of history and the twenty-first century z
eitgeist.

  The West Strikes Back: Representations of the War on Terror

  The attacks on the WTC had an impact on contemporary writers, who either assumed the role of commentators in press articles and/or essays, or incorporated the attacks into their fictional works. The writers’ endeavour shows their acknowledgement of the events in New York as memorable and history-changing, but, at the same time, also hints in the direction of detachment from a tragedy that hit another nation. Referring to the perspective of the American writers on 9/11 , Richard Gray speaks of ‘domestication’, of an internalisation of the trauma produced through an assimilation of the crisis ‘into conventional structures and a series of tropes tending to reassure the reader that nothing has determinately altered’ (2007, 51). Some authors seem to attempt to reach a similar goal, however, not when describing the exact events of 9/11, but when dealing with its aftermath, in fictional works that provide representations of the war on terror (which affected the United Kingdom directly). Such is the case with McEwan and his Saturday (2005), a novel of modernist influence, almost Woolfian in its flight from reality.

  Others adopt a much more engaged and straightforward stance, constructing fiction with the transparent aim of manipulating their readers into rejecting the media feeds coming from the world of politics . Banks would be a perfect example in this respect. Hare , whose play Stuff Happens is discussed further, is an equally good, if not better example of a more straightforwardly political author. In their case, Genette’s observation that ‘there is no such thing as pure fiction and no such thing as history so rigorous that it abjures any “emplotting” and any use of novelistic techniques’, and his conclusion that ‘the two regimes are not that far apart’ (1993, 82) are much easier to embrace than in the case of an allusive and elusive novel which ‘pursues the real but distorts the discourse until it bears less and less resemblance to the historical description of reality’ (Praisler 2005, 11).

  Apart from this distinction between one’s distancing from and the other’s coming to reality , the literary texts selected as representative for their contribution to this segment of 9/11 fiction also belong to different genres: a novel and a play. The latter may probably look like an unnecessary addition in a prose-oriented corpus. Nonetheless, the present undertaking transgresses the clear-cut division of literary genres, focusing on the relation (in terms of both similarities and differences) between fictional and non-fictional, and since Hare’s text mixes the two, the representation of politics it so bounteously provides should not be overlooked.

  Politics from the Limelight to Behind Closed Doors: David Hare’s Play Stuff Happens

  In keeping with the old principle of the palimpsest, according to which a text is never just in suspension but part of a web of texts and discourses interrelated in a continuum of notions and meanings, discourse adaptation may be regarded as the most important of all hypertextual practices, calling upon strategies of imitation, but also employing more complex transformational procedures: ‘la transformation thématique (retournement idéologique), la transvocalisation (passage de la première à la troisième personne) et la translation spatiale’ (Genette 1982, 292). Often based on a reduction principle, which Genette (1982, 323–40) subdivides into excision and concision (simple erasures versus abridgements without the removal of any thematic parts), transposition operates on the original text (hypotext) to create a (new) piece of literary work, whose role may range from the mere praise of textual forerunners, to simplification (for example, transpositions of Shakespeare’s plays into prose), to providing new information from different perspectives (postmodern retellings of classical novels), or to calling upon aspects that might have been overlooked in the deciphering of the hypotext. Despite the tendency to regard the hypertextual relation between two (or more) texts as an exclusive connection operating strictly at the literary level—which implies that a literary text can only enter a subordinate relation with another text of the same type—intertextuality operates, in fact, in multiple directions and across all the available text types.

  A good case in point is the category of verbatim theatre (theatre of fact, documentary theatre, reality theatre, non-fiction dramaturgy). This concept, created by British playwrights in the 1970s so as to ‘give voice to the unheard and to stage stories that might have otherwise never made it to the theatre’ (Paget 1987, 319), finds new uses and meanings after 9/11 , striving to give unmediated access to truths that are either concealed or distorted by the media . Verbatim plays have an inbuilt ‘self-conscious political strain’ (Deeney 2006, 433), and are structured on a technique which combines true, verifiable statements with fictional ones, creating a bridge between factuality and representation. Quotations from the public, political, non-fictional sphere (either translated word for word or adapted) deem the resulted text as hypertextual, in the sense of a direct transposition of a text into a newer one. This transposition within a political literary text referentially reveals the fictionality of what is usually forwarded as truth . Just like fiction , truth is man-made, and it is not simple to tell one from the other . The situation becomes especially problematic when the (original) sender of the message has a stake in imposing his/her truth and makes use of manipulative discursive techniques with a view to contaminating the real with fiction . What metafictional plays in the category of this ‘theatre of the real’ (Martin 2012) do is the opposite: they attempt to contaminate with ‘the real’ those texts that are transmitted and perceived as fictional. This way, they acquire a dual effect: the readers/viewers are warned, on the one hand, against the fictionalisation they are confronted with when watching the news or reading media articles, and, on the other hand, against the prejudice that fiction is completely separated from reality.

  Such theatricalisation of events is ‘created from a specific body of archived material: interviews, documents, hearings, records, video, film , photographs, etc.’ (Martin 2012, 6). Thus, the dramatic text acquires the specificity of a widely discussed postmodern literary species, namely historiographic metafiction, as termed by Linda Hutcheon. Although the postmodern theorist only mentions the novel in her description, the view adopted here is that the features of this type of writing are equally to describe this form of drama: ‘historiographic metafiction is one kind of postmodern novel which asserts the specificity and particularity of the individual past event. It also suggests a distinction between events and facts that is one shared by many historians’ (Hutcheon 2002, 123).

  What is interesting about Stuff Happens , a political play by the renowned British playwright David Hare, published in 2004, whose premiere opened at the National Theatre in London on 1 September 2004 is, in fact, its departure from the main specificity of verbatim theatre, that of a word-for-word transposition from various socio-political texts to stage. The two acts of the play concentrate on the events that led to the beginning of the war on terror against Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2001. The dramatic text ‘borrows’, indeed, from American and British officials’ political statements that can be traced to newspapers and television archives, but, at the same time, it artfully mixes a collection of declarations, allegedly made by the same public figures, which are a result of the author’s imagination.

  Stuff Happens is a play that David Hare defines not as political, but as ‘historical’, having in view the ‘history of the present’. Hare’s points of reference for this (contemporary) history are, chronologically, the controversial election of George W. Bush as the forty-third president of the United States at the end of 2000; his entering into office on 20 January 2001; the attacks on the WTC and the subsequent announcement and initiation of the war on terror; the offensive against Afghanistan , begun on 7 October 2001 by the American military together with its British allies, and joined later by other forces in the Northern Alliance; and the war in Iraq , starting on 20 March 2003.

  Such a list of historical dates and events may seem out of place in a work that deals with the fictional, as long as it preserves its degree o
f fictionalisation and does not slip towards historicism . Once the text has identified itself, both meta- and paratextually, as historical, it has inscribed itself in that category of texts marked by historicity, that is to say, among texts which overtly embrace ‘the cultural specificity, the social embedment’ (Montrose 1984, 20) and, at the same time, construct and mediate a discourse that is contingent on a reality perceived outside their own textuality. This is precisely what Hare’s play provides : a historiographic metafiction transposed into the more straightforward, more to-the-point dramatic genre and, at the same time, in a past that is almost overlapping and definitely affecting the present. As per Hutcheon’s definition, Hare’s play ‘parodically cite[s] the intertexts of the ‘world’ and art, and, in so doing, contest[s] the boundaries that many would unquestionably use to separate the two’ (2002, 127).

  Specifically, what Hare constructs with Stuff Happens may be described as a theatricalisation of actual, verifiable historical events and, what is more, of actual, verifiable statements referring to these events. This theatricalisation produces an interrogation of the relation between factuality and representation , with at the aim of ‘reopening trials, at creating additional historical accounts and at reconstructing events’ (Martin 2002, 13). Notwithstanding the fact that ‘the real’ and ‘the present’ are continually revised and reinvented, the author remarks that theatre and performance that engage the real participate in the ‘larger cultural obsession with capturing the real for consumption’ (Martin 2002, 1).

  Hare’s play seems to reveal an obsession with something radically different from simply capturing the real, or the interplay between fiction and reality : it depicts the geopolitical transformation of the entire world decided by a handful of people, according to perceived national interest. This fact is obvious at first glance—take a look at the list of dramatis personae: Donald Rumsfeld , Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney , Paul Wolfowitz, George Tenet, George Bush and Tony Blair are the characters that are actually given a name (or, rather, the real persons whose names are rendered as such). Almost all the other characters are introduced just as ‘an actor’ or ‘a journalist’, which points to their insignificance on the scale of history, politics and international relations, of their facelessness and lack of individuality on the world stage. Hare’s claim, in the preface of the play (SH not numbered), that his play is a historical one, seems to suggest that he understands history not in any postmodern sense, as fragmented bits of petites histoires put together with the participation of the unknown, the unseen, the unnamed, but instead in the traditional, nineteenth-century historicist understanding. Thus, Hare’s view of history seems to be that its course is determined by authoritative forces that make decisions to which the others, actors and journalists , are only witnesses, having the right to comment on them, but finding themselves unable to oppose them.