Stuff Happens moves away from the common traits of verbatim theatre, which presuppose the direct transposition of various real, recorded statements on stage, although the play displays a significant number of declarations made by the public figures listed above, on the occasion of the attacks on the WTC and afterwards, which can be traced in newspapers and television archives. These statements are counterbalanced by a larger number of fictitious renderings of what the same public figures could have said or, in the author’s words, of statements that are ‘not knowingly untrue’ (SH not numbered). If one were to look for the meanings of Hare’s declaration, one should, most probably, understand that, while signalling the fictionality of his play, he also seems to emphasise the possibility that such statements could have been truly spoken at some point. This is an artful authorial intrusion, which contributes to the interplay of reality and fiction , making the reader/spectator unable to tell one from the other . In what follows, examples of the two predominant techniques in the play are provided: the direct transposition of an official statement and, by contrast, the collage of fictional dialogues between the American officials with regard to the strategy they would further pursue during the war on terror.
The title of the play is ‘borrowed’ from a comment made in a press statement issued by Donald Rumsfeld , the US Secretary of Defense, when asked by journalists why the American troops had pillaged Baghdad and attacked innocent people, after the conquest of the Iraqi city. Towards the end of the play, an Iraqi character voices concern about the racism of Rumsfeld’s statement: ‘then Donald Rumsfeld said “Stuff Happens”. It seemed to me the most racist remark I had ever heard’ (SH 120). It is interesting to note that carelessness is regarded as racism, which may or may not be the case. Be that as it may, Rumsfeld’s statement, translated almost verbatim in the second scene of the first act, is as follows:RUMSFELD: I’ve seen those pictures. I could take pictures in any city in America. Think what’s happened in our cities when we’ve had riots, and problems, and looting. Stuff happens! But in terms of what’s going on in that country, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to see those images over and over and over again of some boy walking out with a vase and say, ‘Oh, my goodness, you didn’t have a plan’. That’s nonsense. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing a terrific job. And it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that’s what’s going to happen here. (SH 3–4)
The statement is archived on the website of the US Department of Defense and is freely accessible.1 Apart from a small alteration of the introductory sentence, the discourse in the fictional text is identical with the speech recorded in the official archive. The goal seems to be to emphasise the recklessness of the statements made by the American administration. Had it not been made famous through fiction and performance, Rumsfeld’s indifference towards the fate of the innocent people of Baghdad would have remained hidden in plain sight—available to the public, indeed, but who is really in the habit of reading the briefings on the Department of Defense website?
Rumsfeld’s statement lacks the adequacy and propriety of conventional diplomatic language. On the contrary, his is an irritable, colloquial speech—if one is to consider the phrases he uses : ‘stuff happens’ (which is a euphemism which replaces the taboo term in the original idiom), ‘nonsense’, ‘my goodness’ and others. Unwittingly, the Secretary of Defense has managed to render his discourse appropriate for performance through the (ab)use of the rhetorical device of anaphora: (‘freedom is untidy and free people are free to… and they are also free to…’) which, paradoxically, sounds almost constructed. This statement is placed at the beginning of the play so as to suggest that the entire development of the plot, which chronologically runs between 30 January 2001 (ten days after Bush’s inauguration) and 11 April 2003 (the date of Rumsfeld’s actual statement), evinces a certain indifference towards the fate of other nations. As Dick Cheney (the character in the play, not the actual vice-president of America) remarks at some point, in a fictitious dialogue exchanged behind the closed doors of the Oval Office, the American administration openly disregard what everybody else wants, including the opinion of their British allies: ‘What I want is to follow this country’s legitimate security concerns. And, for me, those come above everything […] Now: if those interests happen to coincide with an Englishman’s fantasy of how he’s one day going to introduce some universal penalty system—three strikes and the UN says you can overthrow any regime you like—then that’s fine. If not, not, and we won’t miss him’ (SH 104). The Englishman he refers to is the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who in the same dialogue is also belittled by George Bush (again, the same distinction should be made between actual person and character), who states that ‘if he’s not pro-American, he’s nothing’ (SH 105).
Perhaps the most tragic instance of ‘stuff happens’, that is to say, of the American government’s carelessness and pursuit of its ends at all costs, is the representation of a discussion between Bush , Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell , O’Neill, Tenet , Cheney and Rumsfeld—the War Cabinet assembled at Camp David. Of course, the conversation in the play is completely fictional, but it is, at the same time, intended as explanatory of some decisions and actions of the American government in the war on terror, which swept through the Middle East until the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden, on 2 May 2011. The discussion starts with plans to attack Afghanistan , which is ‘a kind of demonstration model, so that other countries can look and say, ‘Oh, I see. That’s what happens’’ (SH 20). Yet, this message is considered not powerful enough: ‘Afghanistan’s a big country, but what are we going to bomb? […] Have you looked at Afghanistan? Terracotta pots and straw roofs!’ (SH 21). The discussion opens the way for deciding to attack Iraq , too, in order as they claim, ‘to establish democracy’.
Moving back from fiction to reality , it has become obvious for everybody, as already shown, that Iraq was not involved in the attacks on the WTC, but, during those years, mechanisms of propaganda were used to connect Al-Qaeda with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Illustrative in this respect is the publication of an official memorandum leaked to the newspaper The Weekly Standard, which was, furthermore, described by Dick Cheney as ‘the best source of information’: Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq , and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda—perhaps even for Mohamed Atta—according to a top secret US government memorandum obtained by The Weekly Standard. (Hayes, The Weekly Standard, 24 November 2003)
Hare’s take on this seems to be that public opinion has been manipulated, and he opposes this with this make-believe strategy of putting fictional words in the mouths of real persons, which makes readers and spectators approach the play ‘as an accurate source of information’ (in Hammond and Steward 2008, 3). In Hammond’s and Steward’s view, shared by Hare , whom they cite, such drama is similar to journalism and the dramatist has the moral obligation not to misrepresent: ‘no play, like no newspaper article, is without bias and inflection, but […] people who work in the theatre tend simply to have much less to gain from lies and spin and much more interest in being honest’ (2008, 4). Therefore, in a journalistic spirit, Hare adds lines that were never actually spoken by the potentates of the world, in order to show the audience the global impact of such media manipulation. The risk of such an approach lies, however, in people’s tendency to take fiction for reality ; in other words, one should not disregard the fictionality at work in the play and should not take Hare’s ‘exposure’ for truth . As long as the reception of the play remains in the representational sphere, the reader/spectator is entitled to question the political decisions made by the Americans and their allies in the aftermath of 9/11 just as the play d
oes itself.
The mix of actual and fictional dialogues in Stuff Happens should not be regarded as misrepresentation, but instead as an attempt at disclosing the misrepresented alliance between the United States on the one side, and the United Kingdom and the rest of the Northern Alliance, on the other . The dissidence of the enterprise should be sought in the way in which what is perceived as real, as true—the actual, verifiable statements of the politicians cited in the play—represents, in fact, just an angle, which may have been backed up by what has not been heard. Ultimately, the theatricalisation of the political events suggests that American–British relations in the context of post-9/11 politics represent ‘a cultural communication problem with fatal consequences for the Iraqi people’ (Golimowska 2012, 13).
David Hare describes his production as a ‘history play which happens to centre on very recent history’ (SH, not numbered) and, in doing so, places his fictional work within the frame of a quest for historic objectivity, although the play may seem overtly anti-American. The perspective adopted here is that one can no longer separate contemporary history and contemporary literature from information and communication and, consequently, that this history play becomes a communication vehicle as effective as traditional means of imparting information.
A Woolfian Flight from Reality: Ian McEwan’s Saturday
Also ‘centred on very recent history’ is Ian McEwan’s Saturday , a novel published in 2005, which chronologically covers 24-hour span: the day of the world protests against the war on Iraq—15 February 2003. This aspect, together with the free indirect discourse —in Bal’s terms (2009, 162): ‘the narrating party approximates as closely as possible the character’s own words without letting it speak directly’—have attracted many comparisons with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). The intertextual relation is either mentioned or thoroughly analysed in monographic studies like that of Dominic Head (2007, 192) or Sebastian Groes, where McEwan’s novel is also connected with Joyce’s short story , The Dead, and Saul Bellow’s Herzog (2009, 100–6); in studies exclusively concerned with the novel’s intertextuality , like Laura Marcus’s ‘Ian McEwan’s Modernist Time: Atonement and Saturday’ (in Groes 2009, 96–8) or Ann Marie Adams’s ‘Mr. McEwan and Mrs. Woolf: How a Saturday in February Follows “This Moment of June”’ (2012, passim); in approaches to time in fiction , like Mark Currie’s About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (2007, 132); but also in newspaper reviews.
Apart from the technicalities employed in the construction of the narrative , the connection between the two novels, written and published at eighty years distance, is established within a framework of contextual determinism which could not be ignored then and cannot be ignored now, either: the proximity of a true, palpable conflict. For Woolf’s generation, that was the Great War, which, with the passing of time and in the light of the atrocities committed in the next world war, was to gradually lose its attribute and be known simply as the First World War . This is a perfect example of the ‘textuality of history’ (Montrose 1984, 20), of the way in which history is rewritten and mediated. This allows for the speculation that contemporary wars and other mass murder events will, in turn, lose their importance, remaining confined to the area of textuality and cultural specificity. Nonetheless, at present, the events outside the text that have influenced contemporary global geopolitics, and which seem to require a flight from reality in the modernist key, are the attacks on the WTC and the outburst of the war on terror, and it is not in the least surprising that this is the historical background of Ian McEwan’s Saturday , although his approach to these events could not be more oblique.
From the perspective of approaching reality directly, and thus fictionalising it (the focal point of this chapter), McEwan’s novel has been considered rewarding thanks to its relation to history, politics and, especially , the media.
The events are mentioned and commented on in the literary text, although left in the background, in favour of a ‘long and static introspection’ (Cuțitaru in România Literară 2007) and of a plot—equally static—which involves a day in the life of one well-off family of Londoners. By choosing not to lay emphasis on issues of magnitude, McEwan seems to reiterate a Woolfian flight from reality towards a fictional day-by-day, ordinary ‘reality’ . Henry Perowne does not buy the flowers himself: instead, he plays squash, wanders around London the whole day in his luxurious Mercedes, cooks a fish stew using his own recipe, discusses literature with his daughter, and so on. All these banalities, together with frequent returns to ‘the summers when the children were babies’ (2005, 131, henceforth S), a technique borrowed, once again, from Mrs Dalloway, seem to point to denial, to a refuge in a world of one’s own, where the demonstrations against wars that are going on in the streets are just hindrances that inconvenience the characters.
Nevertheless, the context is foregrounded by the choice of 15 February 2003 as the day on which the novel is set, but also by the direct allusion to the attacks on the WTC, which marks the start of the novel. Thus, Ian McEwan’s Saturday enters a double-bind relation with the reality outside the text: in a post-traumatic environment induced by the attacks on the WTC, one in which people look to the skies, waiting for planes to crash onto their cities, but also in the immediate vicinity of a future trauma —the approaching of a devastating war, not on their soil, but carried out by their men. The 15 February 2003 is not an ordinary day: as already mentioned, it is the day on which numerous demonstrations against the war on Iraq took place across the world, actions that had the sole effect of repudiating George Bush’s and Tony Blair’s claims that they had the backing of their peoples. BBC News International reported that over two million people marched in the city of London on that day:Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets of London to voice their opposition to military action against Iraq . Police said it was the UK’s biggest ever demonstration with at least 750,000 taking part, although organisers put the figure closer to two million. There were also gatherings in Glasgow and Belfast—all part of a worldwide weekend of protest with hundreds of rallies and marches in up to 60 countries. (2003)
Mrs Dalloway is set after the First World War, which opens the possibilities for the text to delve into the abyss of a conscience seriously affected by shell-shock (currently known as post-traumatic stress disorder); however, if one looks into Woolf’s reality , one may consider her suicide, shortly after the onset of the Second World War, as a refusal to relive the horrors of the first one. McEwan’s novel is temporally placed between two ‘wars’ (the terrorist attacks and Western civilisation’s retaliation), which is the reason why its world is constructed at the crossroads between present trauma and bad omens of things to come. Nonetheless, one does not find many textual representations of these states in Saturday . Henry Perowne, the main character , is a neurosurgeon who, as Cuţitaru remarks, ‘represents the classic prototype of post-industrial achievement’, a right-wing European liberal who supports the military intervention in Iraq (2007, my translation). He incidentally comments on contemporary events, showing his indifference, and, at times, political ignorance. For a prototype of the reliable character (and/ or narrator)—a scientist, whose opinion should be trusted—the neurosurgeon is terribly influenced by what the media feed him (and the entire population). For example, in one of the conversations with his daughter, Daisy, he asserts that ‘the invasion’s going to happen, and militarily it’s bound to succeed’—which is an effect of war propaganda , although he acknowledges the fact that ‘this is hardly the best time for the West to be going at war with any Arab nation’. Moreover, the feeble, never-confirmed excuse that United Nations forces tried to depose Saddam because of his refusal to destroy the nuclear weapons Iraq allegedly possessed, is of no interest to Perowne: ‘the hidden weapons, whether they exist or not, they’re irrelevant’ (S 194). His daughter’s counterarguments are met with the accusation that she is ‘effectively pro-Saddam’ (S 194) if she militates against the war. Quaint as it
may sound, this was, indeed, a position adopted in the press of the time by various pro-war lobbyists and journalists.
Daisy’s arguments, on the other hand, are similar to those expressed in Hare’s play and in Banks’s novel . She hints at the interest of the Americans in deposing a dictator whom they had previously supported:Cheney , Rumsfeld , Wolfowitz. Iraq was always their pet project. Nine eleven was their big chance to talk Bush round. Look at his foreign policy up until then. He was a know-nothing stay-at-home mouse. But there’s nothing linking Iraq to nine eleven, or to Al-Qaeda generally, and no really scary evidence of WMD? Didn’t you hear Blix yesterday? (S 196)2
British and American Representations of 9-11 Page 10