Intended as a transition towards 9/11 fiction , the second part of the chapter discusses three pieces published by The Guardian in the days following the attacks, by two renowned contemporary British authors , Ian McEwan and Martin Amis , whose 9/11 fiction productions are discussed in subsequent chapters. It raises the question of whether this transposition of the author of fiction into the realm of non-fiction is an attempt to bring fiction closer to reality , or whether it hints at the reversal of their roles through fiction’s coming into the domain of the real. Noting that entire paragraphs from press articles have been embedded into the two literary texts, namely Saturday and The Last Days of Muhammad Atta, a distinction is made between the two authorial stances—the former, emotional, is present at the level of the non-fictional text, and the latter, the analytical, in the literary text. This distinction already results in a contradiction regarding text functions, and the analysis attempts to advance the idea that contemporary fiction , deeply anchored in the surrounding reality , has an active, participative dimension, and is intertextually inspired by the media . The final part provides an overview of the most important literary texts belonging to 9/11 fiction , emphasising their heterogeneity regarding genre, style and narrative techniques. It accounts for the critics’ dilemma concerning the postmodernity or post-postmodernity of these texts, for the attempt at establishing a 9/11 fiction canon and for the symbolism of the attacks, from Habermas’s and Baudrillard’s perspectives. Considering the heterogeneous character of the subgenre that brings together neorealist narratives , almost-experimental novels reminiscent of early twentieth-century modernism, metanarrative rewritings of political and journalistic discourses and representations of trauma , the selection was made in the hope of tracing aspects related to mass media, politics , anti-Americanism , terrorism , alterity and Western trauma . In brief, the final subchapter seeks to create a bridge between the communicational spheres in focus: the so-called objective, real fact-based discourses , and the subjective literature . Although fiction can never be taken for reality , the latter can still be altered through discourse and representation , thus acquiring a certain degree/role of fictionalisation .
Chapter 3, Literary Rewritings of History and Politics After 9/11 , is divided into narratives set around 9/11 and during the war on terror . It discusses the novel Dead Air (2002) by Scottish novelist Iain Banks , the play Stuff Happens (2004) by the renowned playwright and scriptwriter David Hare , and the novel Saturday (2005) by Ian McEwan .
Banks’s novel, which begins with the arrival of the news of the attacks during a party in London , may be read as a text about identity, the relationship between the individual and history , the changes in the collective mindset, media manipulation and, of course, as politics as represented by a radio journalist whose views are reminiscent of those of the real author . The analysis has revealed a form of neorealism which, departing from the rules of traditional realism, approaches, to a certain extent, those of historiographic metafiction . The text presents hypotheses and speculations about the attacks on the World Trade Center and does so with the looseness of a writer who feels that literature should remain a censorship-free area, as this allows him to speak up from behind the guise of fiction . A rather transparent aim of the writer is that of helping his readers draw away from the manipulation of the media .
A similar undertaking is David Hare’s play, Stuff Happens , but this is inspired by reality to a greater extent, borrowing entire excerpts from real, documented and archived statements made by important British and American politicians, and mixing them with fictional speeches by the same figures. The play, defined as historical by its author , is close to documentary theatre in terms of structure, and the dramatisation of the events raises questions about the relationship between fact and fiction . Hare’s characters are named Bush , Blair , Cheney , Rumsfeld and de Villepin , and their parts suggest, metatheatrically perhaps, their functioning as puppeteers of a world represented only by the unnamed, the anonymous: ‘a journalist’, ‘an actor’, ‘a Brit in New York ’, ‘an Iraqi exile’, who maintain only the right to comment upon the events whose course has been established by the potentates behind closed doors.
The novel Saturday , by Ian McEwan , provides a completely different perspective despite its construction as a cultural intertext inspired by mass media, upon which it also comments. Influenced by Virginia Woolf , Saturday is an intellectualised refuge from the painful reality of the new millennium. The novel focuses on the trauma experienced by the Western world after the attacks of 9/ 11 , the characters living under the shadow of the seeming inevitability of another terrorist attack (which in fact became real on 7 July 2005, exactly in the year the novel was published, with the attacks in London and Manchester). It is set on a single day, but one extremely resonant in recent history: 15 February 2003, the day of great protests against military intervention in Iraq , and it (re)presents, through an imagined dialogue between a scientist (the neurosurgeon Perowne) and a woman of letters (his daughter), the two opposing positions of the Western world in relation to the American military operations supported by the United Kingdom.
Despite the obvious differences between the three literary texts discussed in this chapter, analysis shows that, in all of them, the relation between reality and fiction is bidirectional in the sense that on the one hand, apparent reality may contain fictionalising elements and, on the other , fiction may be useful in veiling some truths.
The second part of the book, Ideological Reconfigurations of Identity in the Literary Representations of 9/11 , attempts to determine the way in which fictional and non-fictional texts influence, with the help of ideology , identity and the collective mindset. It focuses on the changes of paradigm at the individual and national levels after 9/11 . The construction of the two chapters that make up this part, The Shattered Self of the West and Extreme Otherness : ‘The Muslim Menace’, mirrors the dichotomy between Self and Other , between the West and the East . Chapter 4 sets out from the idea of cultural hegemony , as it was outlined by the Italian ideologist, Antonio Gramsci . The premise of the chapter is that the West is a Self which consists of various hypostases, at varied levels of ‘Westernisation ’, the absolute hegemon of the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first being the United States of America , an economic and cultural rather than a political coloniser. This is why the Western civilisations east of the United States (the great European powers) experience reactions similar to those of the colonised nations during the age of empire. Elements of imagology come to support the analysis of the Western Self, in view to identify the stereotypes which operate at the literary level in the construction of a national identity . For methodological purposes, this chapter has been geographically divided into the USA and the rest of the world, represented only by the United Kingdom because of the scope of the research project.
Therefore, the subchapter At the Heart of the Storm: America After 9/11 discusses the impact of the events of 9/11 on the American people, confronted for the first time since the Civil War with a tragedy of such magnitude on their soil. The literary texts selected for analysis, Falling Man (2007) and The Submission (2013), written by Don DeLillo and Amy Waldman , respectively, provide two complementary variants of the American auto-image. DeLillo’s ekphrastic, postmodern novel , pointing to the inner dimension and suggesting psychoanalytical investigations into trauma and Freudian mourning and melancholy, provides images of Americans who cannot understand what has befallen them and are unable to move on. Political and journalistic insertions do exist, but they are relegated to a reality from which the characters try to distance themselves. Falling Man is not a novel about 9/11 , but rather a novel about the many representations of 9/11 . It is a novel of a collapsing empire, symbolically represented by the fall of the two towers. The depressing auto-image of the American defeated by history in this opus does not truly fit the neorealist patterns—as DeLillo’s catalogue does not either—but I maintain tha
t Falling Man is not a piece to be left outside any critical investigation of 9/11 fiction , whatever the approach. Concerning social realism/urban fiction /Americanism , a better case is made by former journalist Amy Waldman’s first novel The Submission (2011), published about the tenth anniversary of 9/11 . The premise of the novel, a Muslim architect winning a blind contest for the design of a memorial to the attacks, raises the ethical dilemma of whether an American should feel offended or not by such an occurrence. Should the architect’s religious heritage, shared with the terrorists , matter, or should art and memorialising prevail? With a keen eye for detail, accounted for by her professional background, Waldman constructs a piece of literary journalism which employs the polyphonic voices of the American public sphere where politicians, journalists , families of the victims, Christians and Muslims, radicals and moderates are called upon to participate in the debate.
The second part of the chapter, The Big (Br)Other: Anti-Americanism in British Contemporary Literature, also focuses on Americans , this time displacing them into the position of a Western Other , from the European perspective. It outlines the centennial tradition of the European prejudice against the USA , which emerged in the eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth century, only to turn, with the expansion of the American spheres of influence after World War II and especially after 9/11, into envy, resentment and even Schadenfreude. The British literary texts considered illustrative for this form of alterity , Dead Air by Iain Banks and Stuff Happens by David Hare , question whether such attitudes reflect a marginal positioning in relation to American imperialism or, on the contrary, a Eurocentric one that looks down on the Americans . The answer is—as always—somewhere in between, but it is more important that both texts provide a rather negative hetero-image of the Americans , be they ordinary people, in Banks’s case, or the military and political leaders of the United States (and, by extension, of the entire world) in Hare’s case. It is also interesting that the European tendency is to move on more quickly after the trauma induced by the terrorist attack. Although they are also Westerners who sympathise with the American people and worry that they might be the next target, the British nevertheless seem to easily overcome the shock, which suggests once again that distance and mediation tend to attenuate the negative effects of what happens to somebody else.
Chapter 5, Extreme Otherness : ‘The Muslim Menace’, is divided into four parts, starting from the antithetic description of two theories of representation , anchored in culture , history and sociology. The first theory refers to the famous concept of Orientalism , as understood since the publication of the work of the same title by Edward Said (1978), while the second, Occidentalism , is a reaction to the arguments of Said—an American scholar of Palestinian descent—who completely denies its existence by suggesting that the Western hegemony since the colonial era to the present day has prevented the Orient from offering, in its turn, representations of the Occident . Only aspects related to the constructed images of the Other , acquired through discourse and representation, have been borrowed from Orientalism . In other words, Foucault’s influence on Said has been used to prove that the products of the cultural sphere are representational. Focus is laid on the identification of the ‘contemporary Orientalist attitudes which flood the press and the popular mind’ (Said 2003, 108), and more precisely, on the stereotypical representations of the Other projected in the contemporary collective mindset. Occidentalism , on the other hand, should be construed as a reference frame and as an intertextual resource for the construction of the characters embodying Muslim terrorists , be they real or imaginary. The subchapter gives examples from the statements or writings of important Muslim fundamentalist leaders and thinkers, which will be found, in the second part of the chapter, in the lines or ideas expressed by such characters .
In an attempt to understand the reasoning of those who choose martyrdom, while also killing a large number of innocent people in the name of Allah , the following subchapter deals with the mechanisms of social control, starting from concepts coined by Foucault , Deleuze and Althusser , and emphasising the influence of religion as a main control factor in the Islamic civilisations. Prefaced by a description of the Islamophobic press commentaries after 9/11 , which had an overwhelming influence on public opinion, resulting in unjustified attacks on Muslims in general, the literary analyses focus on two very important texts belonging to 9/11 fiction : Martin Amis’s short story , The Last Days of Muhammad Atta (2006) and, for the second time, on Don DeLillo’s novel , Falling Man (2007). The analysis attempts to debunk the idea that these are prejudiced Orientalist texts, and argues instead that they make up portraits of ordinary people who have been made murderous through political or religious indoctrination. Amis , a well-known adversary of Islamism , which he clearly differentiates from Islam , exaggerates the familiar stereotype of the evil terrorist , defamiliarising it by constructing his character as an atheist with no interest in the Qur’an’s promises for the afterlife. DeLillo takes a different path to reach the same point, constructing a character normal by Western standards, who is manipulated, and ends up being one of the nineteen hijackers, nothing but instruments in the attacks of 9/11 . These texts are not to be considered realist fiction , aside from their drawing inspiration from the press and documents such as Muhammad Atta’s testament, in outlining the terrorists’ route to their crash into the Twin Towers ; still, they acquire social and political significance through the nature of the subject they approach. No literary text with such ideological implications could pass the test of realism, mostly because of its subjectivity. However, searching for a little objectivity in a demarche otherwise doomed to subjectivity is the task of the closing part of this chapter, again focusing on Amy Waldman’s The Submission . This time, the construction of the Muslim identity is less interested in counteracting Orientalism , and more in producing a piece of social realism along the lines imposed by the liberal media in the last few years. Lastly, since the need to give the Other a voice has come naturally, the closing argument is handed to Mohsin Hamid and to his much applauded The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), a text which has become emblematic for the postcolonial, soi-même comme un autre fiction in the context of 9 /11.
The conclusions converge towards the realisation that the literary responses to 9/11 , relatively few in number, but authored by famous names, rewrite the past and renegotiate its valences, reconfigure spaces and mentalities, bringing identity mechanisms, power structures, discursive practices and the ‘archaeology of knowledge’ to the fore. They make up a literary subgenre, anchored for the most part in neorealism , with similar themes but varied styles and forms, which might pass the test of time due partly to its provoking realism, partly to its reality-fiction games and also to its descriptions of the terror in which the Occident lives, threatened by an enemy that it cannot comprehend.
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