British and American Representations of 9-11

by Oana-Celia Gheorghiu

  ‘To give an Author to the text…’ The Submission clearly has a ready-made author who is firstly a journalist and whose characters are fluent in journalese. A final significance, a closing of the writing is, however, never acquired, even in the present context of ‘new media’ literature and criticism, when novelists are encouraged to give lengthy interviews or presentations on television (or YouTube) in which they more or less explain what they were thinking. Amy Waldman certainly does this quite often, and her explanations may be felt as an imposition on the part of an author who tells her readers how to read the text they are offered. Then again, why is this still supposed to be a problem? Postmodernism , whether (improbably) coming to an end at the time of some historically delineable events—proposals have been made in this respect, placing its demise either at the end of the Cold War, with the dissolution of the communist bloc or, more recently, at the WTC attacks—or, rather, gradually coming out of fashion in the 1990s and the 2000s, relied on ‘elusiveness of meaning and knowledge’ (Kirby 2006), which made the readers of postmodern literature painfully aware that they were deceived, wilfully set on a road not taken or less likely to be taken. The text had self-awareness, the readers only had to have the awareness that they might be misguided by a linguistic plot carefully weaved by an author who apparently ‘chose to indict or abolish himself or herself’ (Kirby 2006), but who was, in fact, as omnipresent and authoritarian as Fowles or Amis’s authors in their books. Consequently, Amy Waldman’s authorial explanations with regard to her novel published in 2011 (around the tenth anniversary of the events of WTC and hence, post-postmodern, at least chronologically speaking), entail two downsides, if looked at from a postmodern perspective: on the one hand, they are authoritarian, on the other , the author, a mischievous entity who has long played dead, exercises her post-truths on us, the readers, rightfully entitled to our own way of grasping the meaning of the text. Actually, Waldman’s post-truth resides somewhere else—in her attempts at defending her newly acquired status as a novelist by denying the journalistic work the documentation of the book may have entailed (PBS News Hour on YouTube).

  Post-truth is not a politically correct euphemism for lie, but rather another blurred border between fiction and non-fiction , perhaps a naïve self-deceit that, in our age, non-fiction lives on TV, on the internet, in newspapers or history books and articles, while literature is completely relegated to the sphere of imagination. This is no longer true (if it ever was), even in the case of fantasy books or sci-fi dystopias, where the effect of the real is much more carefully concealed behind the guises of different times or worlds, let alone in a literature so connected to the world and events outside its own textuality as is 9/11 fiction . Because The Submission is ‘a new kind’ of 9/11 fiction , as some reviewers venture to call it, although it seems too soon to talk about a second wave of 9/11 fiction . Granted, if one considers 9/11 fiction an all-American affair, taking into consideration only its early products authored by DeLillo , Safran Foer and Messud, or its poetic Portraits of Grief or its ‘imagined encounters with the bereaved, mini-whodunits, urban legends, scenarios of the unimaginable, paeans to the city, explorations of a terrorist’s mind […] several authors’ own private 9/11’s’ (Baer 2002, 5) collected in 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11, texts whose common denominators are mourning and trauma , one may assert that The Submission is different. However, if one relates to the transatlantic approaches to the subgenre, as is the case here, one can easily notice the novel’s great indebtedness to political and journalistic discourses, much in the way that Iain Banks employed them in the construction of his 2002 novel, Dead Air. This is the reason why the present section sets out to look into the Americanism embedded into the textual weavings of Amy Waldman’s The Submission , with a view to establishing whether its neorealism may count as trauma overcome or, on the contrary, if American 9/11 fiction written and published at a safe distance in time from the events has come to firmly incorporate trauma and mourning as inherent tenets.

  It is worth mentioning that Waldman’s novel provides two equally rewarding avenues of considering tis structure and themes. The former, which constitutes the core of this section, refers to the representation of America , in view of validating the assumption that the borders between America and its fictional counterpart are unstable and mutable from one representation to the next, and thus naturally unreliable as documents of a reality outside the text. The latter, to be dealt with in Chap. 5, refers to the representation of the Muslim Other and to the way in which this is (or not) informed by Orientalism and/or Islamophobia.

  The matter at hand is not whether Waldman’s representation of America is ‘truer’, or more realistic than DeLillo’s, which would somehow qualify her writing for making a better case of the American auto-image than the postmodernity-laden Falling Man. What is relevant is that it is different—it indeed brings its discernible contribution to a table full of Americas after 9/11 in a form that one could term social fresco, had one not feared alluding to Victorian Realism or even to the early novels of the eighteenth century. This might open up the debate on how much the so-called realism of the twenty-first century returns to the traditional ‘ways of the novel, or quest for verisimilitude’ (Colipcă 2005), what narrative strategies it employs or how successful it is in this endeavour. Even on how felicitous such a return may be—is the consumer of fiction so fed up with psychologism and allusiveness that they welcome a return to the literary journalism of Daniel Defoe? Is it possible that ‘the intelligentsia [that] have always had contempt for the realistic novel’ (Wolfe 1989, 47) have finally surrendered to the famous American author’s plea for ‘New Journalism’ and social novel? Judging by the plethora of enthusiastic reviews Waldman has received since the publication of her debut novel, it definitely seems so.

  Nevertheless, alluring as this approach may sound, it would divert the discussion from the ideologically informed New Historicism that this commentary observes. It is better if this matter is left to comparative literature critics, while still making use (with a pinch of salt, of course—after all, Modernism and postmodernism did not come and go for nothing) of perhaps obsolete, concepts such as social fresco, social commentary, omniscient narrator or stereotypically constructed characters , representative for ‘a considerable range of demographics’ (Keeble 2014). ‘Social’ seems to be a keyword with Waldman , partially explicable by her closeness to non-fiction , as Emily Witt stresses in her review: the novel would be ‘more a synthesis of her first-hand experience as a reporter than an examination of collective memory’ (The New York Observer 2011). In fact, the author’s propensity towards supposedly objective journalistic discourse is what draws her both praise and harsh criticism, and also scepticism with regard to her ‘determination to place the book in a purely fictional realm (and assert again that it was not her intention to write a 9/11 novel)’ (Witt 2011). A strategy used to that end is not mentioning 9/11. Does this omission place The Submission in an undetermined space or time, as an aftermath of some tragic unnamed event? Not at all. Actually, if one considers Versluys’s classification of 9/11 fiction into four categories—‘the novel of recuperation, the novel of first-hand witnessing, the great New York novel, and the novel of the outsider’ (2007, 65), where the last category refers to European 9/11 fiction , and is, therefore, inapplicable, The Submission may be ascribed to all the other three. Its premise, regarded either as metafictional—owing to the fact that ‘the novel itself is invested in the question of how to remember and represent 9/11’ (Keeble 2014)—or as ekphrastic, referring to the way in which memorialising should keep the event in the memory of the Americans , is one of recuperation. This is actually not a far cry from DeLillo’s fictional excursion into how 9/11 should be represented.

  Although Americans can ever forget the planes crossing the Manhattan sky, their impact with the towers, the crashes and the 3000 dead; this does not hinder their urge to artistically represent the unforgettable. Specifically, The Submi
ssion sets out from the fictional account of a juried contest with anonymous submissions for a memorial monument intended as ‘a national symbol, an historic signifier, a way to make sure anyone who visits—no matter how attenuated their link in time or geography to the attack—understands how it felt, what it meant’ (Waldman 2012, 6). Coming to a tie between two finalists—and this is perhaps the moment to mention that the actual memorial at the Ground Zero site is somewhat reminiscent of both of them—the jury votes for the project entitled The Garden, which proves to have been designed by a Muslim architect, Mohammad Khan. This, rather predictably, triggers a never-ending debate in which every representative American figure feels entitled to have their say. The ethical debate as to whether Khan should withdraw his project out of respect for the victims of the tragedy covers the entire plot, involving characters standing for the family of the victims (first-hand witnesses, in a way), but also people from all American strata: politicians, journalists , activists, Christians and Muslims, radicals and moderates—in other words, the melting pot that is America . According to Amir Khadem, ‘the novel’s polyphony , a laborious product of cataloguing almost every political voice, from the far-right xenophobe to stark defenders of tolerance, is visible in numerous fictional simulations of news reports, radio and television shows, op-ed pieces and press conferences’ (2015, 68), which comes to support the notion that, in twenty-first century neorealism , fictional and non-fictional discourses inform one another. This multiplicity of voices may be what qualifies The Submission as heir apparent to that tradition of ‘the great New York novel’, less in a geographical sense, and more in that of a conglomerate of discourses in the public sphere . Waldman aptly directs the critics on this path by intertextually alluding early in the novel (7) to the famous epitome of contemporary social realism that is Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). As Sonia Baelo-Allué (2016, 170) rightly remarks, ‘upon publication, reviewers first tried to establish a literary context in which to place the novel, they largely ignored 9/11 literature and focused instead on big political and social novels like Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities’.

  ‘The idea of writing a novel about this astonishing metropolis, a big novel, cramming as much of New York City between covers as you could, was the most tempting, the most challenging and the most obvious idea an American writer could possibly have’, Wolfe wrote in his literary manifesto (1989, 45). Waldman’s indebtedness to Wolfe’s ideas is undeniable, and her writing is clearly influenced by the journalistic discourse in which she is naturally versed. However, the pervasiveness of the attacks of 9/11 throughout the novel is equally irrefutable, even in the absence of their being named, which questions Waldman’s claims that she did not write a piece of 9/11 fiction . In an insightful chapter on what she calls ‘archifictions’, fiction about buildings, with emphasis on the twin towers of the WTC, included in the volume Transatlantic Literature and Culture after 9/11, Laura Frost is trenchant: ‘Waldman never names the attacks as 9/11, but her descriptions leave no doubt’ (2014, 212). Unarguably so. Shall we call again upon the authorial (self-)deceitfulness? Perhaps the best way of looking into The Submission may be that of combining the two possible readings: following the attacks, a novel about New York simply cannot neglect the events of 9/11, just as a piece of 9/11 fiction can hardly disregard the overwhelming presence of the city in which the events took place.

  Intertextuality is not only used for the purpose of emphasising Americanism or New York City urbanism instead of having the reviewers look at the literary product from the sole perspective of its belonging to 9/11 fiction. Waldman also employs it so as to draw attention to one of her sources of inspiration, namely the controversy surrounding the Chinese American Maya Lin’s winning the public design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in 1981.Many critics, veterans, veteran organizations, and public figures argued that Lin was […] of the wrong nationality to be designing this ‘American’ monument. Many Americans of that time did not see Asians as United States citizens. To these people, the definition and image of an American was someone who is white or of European descent. (Sands 2005)

  In the novel , upon revealing the name of the winner of the contest for the 9/11 memorial , a member of the jury forebodingly announces: ‘It’s Maya Lin all over again. But worse’ (Waldman 2012, 20). It is debatable whether Mohammad Khan’s designing of the memorial for the catastrophe produced by Muslim terrorists is even more unimaginable than having an Asian design a monument for the Vietnam War. Should it matter or should the paternity of art be cast aside, leaving art alone to prevail? This is the moral dilemma which the representations of the Americans in Waldman’s novel are trying to address.

  The novel is less concerned with the urban space, as is the case with DeLillo and many others , and much more, in the spirit of literary geographies, with an ‘aesthetic conjunction between socio-spatial, economic, political and cultural practices’ which should determine ‘the formation of a peculiar and singular urban consciousness’ (Neculai 2014, 48). However, this urban consciousness is not singular, but rather kaleidoscopic. Post-9/11 New York City is realistically depicted as a multiverse, the perspective shifting according to a clearly delineated social classification. If one chose to analyse Waldman’s petite histoire through a Marxist-oriented lens, one could not refrain from noticing that The Submission carries its readers along a spectrum of social strata: from the upper class representatives—the governor, artists and art critics, stars like Susan Sarandon and Robert de Niro, architects and lawyers with an Ivy League education—to openly Islamophobic Irish workers and single mums turned activists, on the one hand, and minorities bent on defending their rights to be equally treated as Americans, on the other. Down below, unacknowledged even in death, are the illegal Bangladeshi migrants, living undocumented in their enclosed ‘little Dhaka’, speaking little to no English, yet trying to live the American dream.5 The ‘cast of characters’ is polarised between these two extremes, which may be indicative of the ‘us versus them’ effect that the novel acquires, despite its not being regarded as ‘Orientalist’ as are other American-authored texts.

  The link between these many ‘small worlds’ is the Fourth Estate, represented in the novel by the newspapers Daily News and New York Post—through the paparazzo-natured journalist Alyssa Spier—The New York Times and The New Yorker, the television network Fox News, and ‘Lou Sarge, New York’s most popular right-wing radio host [who] in the months after the attack had added the tagline ‘I Slam Islam’ to his show’ (Waldman 2012, 50). The press stirs reactions through anonymous sources, blackmail, false or exaggerated statements and incendiary editorials. It is that hegemonic power Gramsci described as not imposing, but persuading, although its techniques verge on imposition at times. With a rather conservative narrative technique—it employs an episodic construction, analeptic here and there, and an omniscient third-person narrator who focalises on each key character in turn—the novel introduces, nevertheless, an innovation at the character level: the Muslim architect Mohammad Khan is only apparently the main character , which is, in fact, either the media or the American people after the attacks, with their trauma , fear and intolerance. This is, though, what gives The Submission a somewhat limited reach, in the sense that one has to have lived, either directly or indirectly, the tragedy of 9/11 to be able to grasp the magnitude of the issue at the core of the novel . Despite its barely veiled reference to a historical event relevant for world politics , despite the cosmopolitanism of the setting (and of the characters , of course), The Submission still has the air of a regional novel, one that can only appeal to New Yorkers. It is safe to assume that trauma plays an important role in the Americanism of the novel, as it does in most American literary productions belonging to 9/11—one of the notable differences from the European approaches, as shown later in this chapter. Two years after the attacks, the wounds cannot be completely healed, therefore attempts are made at an exploitation of trauma—three of the key characters are
family members of people killed in the attacks—Claire Burwell, Harvard-educated lawyer and widow of one of the dead of 9/11, Asma Anwar, a Bangladeshi illegal whose husband worked as a janitor in the towers, and Sean Gallagher, who lost his brother, Patrick, a heroic first-responder. Sean’s trauma prompts him to return for seven months after that ‘insultingly beautiful morning’ (2012, 71) to the scene of the attacks to help find bodies and clean the area, and then to organise protests and deliver speeches ‘to Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs and police and fire-fighter and veterans’ organizations, all of them eager for a first-hand account of the rescue and recovery’ (72). Sean feels like the lesser child, as he is painfully aware of his parents’ barely concealed regret that they were left with him instead of Patrick, and his actions appear induced by frustration. What the two women experience rather resembles trauma . Claire displays typical manifestations of PTSD . In an article concerning women and psychological trauma after 9/11, Zabihzadeh, Hashim and Raihanah point to her nightmares as ‘an unending cycle of a truth that is oftentimes incomprehensible in times of consciousness’ (2017, 55), arguing that her struggle is ‘subtly addressed throughout the novel ’ (54). They consider her choice for The Garden, Khan’s project, as a Freudian reflection of her longing for healing. Asma, on the other hand, is less concerned with the loss, and more with her husband’s chances of reaching paradise because he was cremated and not properly buried, and also with her risks of being deported and forced to live with her husband’s relatives, as Islamic tradition requires of a widow. Asma’s is still a tragedy that ‘combine[s] the global and the local, the numbness of psychological trauma with the polyphony of cultural trauma, and which is rooted both in the domestic and the personal but does not ignore globalisation and the way it affects all types of identities’ (Baelo-Allué 2016, 168). It could be asserted that she is, if only to a certain extent, denied the trauma to which only Americans are entitled, although her loss is similar to Claire’s.