However, the world was not as ready to accept Bush ’s statements about Iraq being part of ‘the axis of evil’. On 15 February 2003, the largest anti-war protest in recent history took place in more than 60 countries around the world, involving millions and millions of people. The demonstrations changed nothing, and the invasion started, as planned, on 20 March 2003; but they did prove a lack in terms of the legitimation that Bush and Blair had claimed to have from their respective nations. The protest in London , which according to the BBC involved two million people, featured a rare public speech from the playwright Harold Pinter, who stated that ‘America was a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics, with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug’ (BBC News, 19 February 2003). The events of the day represent the background for the plot of Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel , Saturday , which is why they will be detailed in connection with an analysis of that work.
By foregrounding the unaltered public declarations of statespersons such as Bush , but also placing emphasis on official records of the same events, such as ‘The 9/11 Commission Report’, the media played a key role in determining how the public perceived the facts. It would be useful, therefore, to check exactly how these facts have been represented—all the more so if one starts from the assumption that the fiction that deals with the matters exposed is much more influenced by the media than by the official accounts. Thus, the following sections aim at mirroring the present section by presenting the media (ted) representation of the events of 9/11.
The Newsroom, or Where Fictionalisation Begins
Analysis of the media accounts surrounding the attacks on the WTC entails an understanding of their discourses —that is, as distancing themselves from the domain of reality and nearing that of fiction . This approach to reality and/versus fiction is closely related to a concept used in theories of discourse , namely fictionalism, which is roughly defined as ‘the view that claims made within that discourse are not best seen as aiming at literal truth but are better regarded as a sort of “fiction ”’ (Eklund 2011).
From this standpoint, it is maintained here that 9/11 has been presented to the public as a narrative concocted in the newsrooms of the main American news networks. At 8:46 a.m., the plane crashing into the North Tower was a fact. At 8:48, only two minutes later, as soon as CNN went live with Breaking News, it had already become representation to such an extent that numerous voices have claimed that it was, actually, a ‘representation’ from the very beginning. Of course, no one can reasonably deny the crash itself—although some far-fetched theories of conspiracy have gone this far. From this point on, every reference made to the crash of the two planes and to the fall of the two towers is no more, no less than the intertextual embedding of an initial multimodal hypotext, a palimpsest of the disaster (and of its aftermath), as seen on TV. With this fiction-oriented view in mind, and, at the same time, with consideration to the core of the literary theories further applied, which holds that literary and non-literary texts in a given period are inseparable, it should not come as a surprise if the outline of a few representative media accounts acquires, at times, a marked dimension of literary criticism , certainly unusual in analysing media /television texts. For this purpose, the media texts have been divided into three categories: broadcast/published during the shock/denial stage (‘this can’t be happening!’), during the stage of fury (against the terrorists , in this particular case), and, finally, during the analytical stage.
In keeping with the approach of the narrative of 9/11 as a hypertextual relation, the hypotext is dealt with here: a selection of moments of the live footage of CNN , from the minutes after the crash of the first plane until the collapse of the North Tower. CNN has been selected for two reasons: it was the first station to break the news —although the other American major networks quickly followed—and it has a good online presence, providing easy access to videos and transcripts. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that the footage chosen here is illustrative of the entire array of ‘live representations of 9/11’ (consulted online at archive.org), which is why the expanded analysis of other broadcasts has been deemed superfluous.
A natural point of departure seems to be the definition of a few operational concepts of the mass media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, further employed in the short overview of the media coverage of the events in focus. The discussion will focus on the distinction between providing information, on the one hand, and commenting on and analysing information, on the other. The former, central to the present discussion, refers to news and to related terms such as breaking news, live footage and news television. The latter traditionally occurs at a later stage, after the crystallisation of the information provided by the news, and ranges from talk shows and expert opinions (mostly in the visual media ) to editorials (primarily, but not exclusively, in the written press).
The live coverage of the WTC attacks on CNN is neither a dissemination of false information, nor manipulation . It does not look like a case of disinformation (wrong and purposely misleading information, dissemination of deliberately false information, as the OED defines it), nor even as one of misinformation (wrong, perhaps misleading and false, but not knowingly and willingly forwarded as truth )—not that the distinction between the two would matter in relation to an illusory universal truth .
The footage broadcast by CNN on 11 September 2001 qualifies as news only in the sense that it provides the viewers with images from the scene of the disaster. Other than that, the footage is just a quest for information, not information proper. Analysed in terms of narrative structure, the footage/story unwinds as a scene, with the anchor playing the part of an unreliable heterodiegetic narrator mingling occasionally with its characters . Focalisation constantly shifts from one interviewee (seen as a character in the story) to the next, which, in point of frequency and the time of the narration, produces a simultaneous, iterative narrative . In Genette’s words, what CNN provides by showing the image of the North Tower in flames, then the crash of the second plane in the South Tower is an instance of ‘narrating n times what happened once […] with variations in point of view’ (1980, 115). For the most part, images do the work of language, but actual language is also important, being forwarded in direct speech uttered by eye/I-witnesses, further ‘mediated by the narrator , where the “replies” of the “characters ” are dissolved and condensed into indirect discourse ’ (Genette 1980, 163).
Having thus accounted for its hypotextual nature and its narrative structure, a few samples of the actual plot development will be presented to demonstrate their unreliability. At 8:48 a.m., an image of the two towers covered in thick smoke suddenly appears on the television screen, interrupting an advertisement without any notice, except for the announcement in capital letters: ‘BREAKING NEWS—WORLD TRADE CENTER DISASTER’. The voice of the anchor-woman Carol Lin bursts out, clearly agitated:This just in. You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center , and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. CNN Center right now is just beginning to work on this story, obviously calling our sources and trying to figure out exactly what happened. But clearly something relatively devastating is happening this morning there, on the south end of the island Manhattan . That is, once again, a picture of one of the towers of the World Trade Center. (archive.org V08527-04, 00:01:30–00:02:03)
Apart from the initial elliptical sentence ‘this just in’, which signals, in television jargon, that an important piece of news has arrived while on air, the anchor woman’s discourse reveals a narrator unaware of the development of the story, which she witnesses practically at the same time as her narratees (viewers, in this case). She is careful enough to announce that the news has not been verified yet—her lexical choice is ‘unconfirmed reports’, while, in other cases, a grammatical mark is preferred to convey the same meaning—for example, BBC World News anchor will announce, about ten minutes
later, that ‘a plane seems to have crashed into the World Trade Center ’ (archive.org V08517-32, 00:23:41), while ABC goes on air at 8:51 a.m., with the introduction: ‘we just got a report that there was some sort of an explosion at the World Trade Center. One report says … and we can’t confirm any of these—that a plane may have hit one of the two towers of the World Trade Center’ (archive.org V08546-05, 00:19:57–00:20:05). To return to the CNN footage, one may note that the speech has not been previously polished—it abounds in adverbs, avoidable from a stylistic point of view; moreover, it repeats some of these adverbs, as is the case with ‘obviously’ (and its synonym, ‘clearly’). Ill-formed collocations appear during the speech, due to the same unpreparedness and rush to be the first to break the news. Such is the case of the construction ‘relatively devastating’.
Therefore, the narrator —whose role may also overlap in this case with the function of a prologue of an early modern drama—reveals little to no information. While an anchor is expected to show steadiness and certainty when presenting the news , she proves her unreliability: firstly, by admitting that she does not know anything; secondly, by showing her emotions throughout her speech, which suffers in point of style, grammar and even logic; and thirdly, by allowing an entire array of secondary characters (people in the street, people living across the WTC area, and so on) to build up the storyline by adding their equally subjective points of view. Such accounts prove more relevant to the present undertaking, in that they dwell on the peripheral side of the story, much in the same way as the characters in the then yet unwritten 9/11 novels. There is no godlike authorial presence to have previously endowed them with knowledge, neither have they submitted yet to the overwhelming influence of the press. They simply describe what they see (saw). For comparative purposes, let us look at one of these accounts, and then at the opening chapter of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, a novel that provides a perspective on the moments of the attacks directly from Ground Zero, and not from the other side of the Atlantic.JeanneI can tell you that I was watching TV, and there was this sonic boom, and the TV went out. […] And I went to the window—I live in Battery Park City, right next to the twin towers —and I looked up, and the side of the World Trade Center exploded. At this point, debris started falling. I couldn’t believe what I was watching. […]
CelliniJeanne, can you see any of the debris currently on the ground area?
JeanneAbsolutely. It’s continuing to flutter down like leaflets, and at first there was tons of debris, and it continues to fall out. And it looks like these uppermost floors are definitely on fire. (archive.org V08527-04 00:07:59–00:09:24)
One may notice that the report of this occasional narrator/reporter is descriptive, offering the narratees apocalyptic imagery which they can almost perceive visually and hear for themselves. This narrator does not pass judgements, nor does she have any opinions on the matter—she simply narrates what she sees and hears. She missed the ‘point zero’, the moment of the impact (actually, she heard it—‘there was this sonic boom’), but that is of no concern to her, as she was immediately informed… by television :LinJeanne, you are saying you didn’t see anything initially. You didn’t see a plane approach the building?
JeanneI had no idea it was a plane. I just saw the entire top part of the World Trade Center explode. So I turned on the TV when I heard they said it was a plane. It was really strange. (archive.org V08527-04 00:10:05–00:10:24, my emphasis)
Thus, the informers inform one another, which may affect the accuracy of the information and the credibility of the press. It has become almost de riguer for the contemporary world to rely on the news media as carriers of information, forgetting that the latter are not in a position to offer truths but interpretations and representations adapted from bits and pieces of reality . It is not that divorced a scenario from contemporary realist ‘practices of writing’, where reality is construed, in full agreement with David Lodge’s views on the matter, as ‘not only a mimetic representation of experience, but also [as] the organisation of narrative according to a logic of causality and temporal sequence’ (1996, 6). The media representation —by resorting to subjective opinions of people who become narrators, narrated and narratees at the same time, as is the case of the eye-witness above—may be regarded not as reality , but as a realist fiction . And that is inferred only from the narrative techniques used in the construction of the reportage, leaving aside the function of television as a simulacrum of the real.
Following the reasoning of David Lodge , who points to the existence of the real and the topical even in a magical realist novel such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, ‘the exploding jumbo jet is as real and topical as yesterday’s newsreel’ (1996, 7), the present scrutiny of the ‘zero moment’ at Ground Zero draws a close parallel with the news coverage and the fictional representation of the same event through the eyes of a fictional survivor of the attacks, Keith Neudecker, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. The novel is anything but realist—in fact, the novelist declares himself a modernist writer: ‘If I had to classify myself, it would be in the long line of modernists, from James Joyce through William Faulkner and so on. That has always been my model’ (Singer 2010). However, the final part of the disclaimer of a famous postmodern opus, The Alexandria Quartet, applies to Falling Man as if it were written for it: ‘Only the city is real’ (Durrell 1991). The space in Falling Man is painstakingly real, and its description, perhaps too fast-paced for what is named in narratology a descriptive pause (Genette 1996, 99–106), bears clear resemblance to that provided by the media :It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running holding towels to their faces or jackets over their face. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.
The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash coming down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office papers flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall. (DeLillo 2007, 3)
Unless Don DeLillo was an eye-witness at the WTC or had interviewed some of the survivors—details that would have been mentioned in interviews and biographies, had it been the case—the opening lines of Falling Man, a vivid and almost cinematic description of the scene of the disaster, represent a hypertext (reduced to writing) of the multimodal text provided by the news networks during the early hours of 9/11. The news presented brought, in fact, no more information than this fictional rendition, relying on similar subjective perspectives and lack of certainty. This blurs the boundary between the media , as alleged conveyors of the truth and of reality , and fiction , usually regarded as merely representational and fleeing from reality .
The Post-traumatic Shock in the Press
The news broadcasts on 11 September 2001 simply provided information on the two crashes and the two subsequent collapses of the twin towers , and featured statements made by President Bush and other officials, announcing the alleged involvement of Al-Qaeda in the attacks and promising ‘to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act’ (Bush 2001a, b). As apparent from the timeline detailed above, plans for retribution started the next day, with America stating its intention to attack Afghanistan , the Taliban -governed country that was assumed to have aided the leaders of Al-Qaeda. September 2001 does not prove particularly rewarding in providing commentaries and analyses on the facts—media are simply content to quote official statements, and supply news on the developments of the war strategy. Nevertheless, this period, although partly characterised by bombarding the public with unfiltere
d information, is powerfully influenced by uncertainty and fury against the perpetrators, which, at the media level, translates into a large numbers of editorials written mostly but not only by prominent media figures.
The following day, 12 September 2001, belongs to the newspapers: the written media around the world provide detailed coverage of the events of the previous day. A quick look at the headlines on the front page of The New York Times reveals a deep plunge into the language of fiction specific to a genre which ‘shocks and frightens the reader and/or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing’ (Cuddon 1992, 416), that is, horror. Under a huge headline printed in bold, which reads ‘U.S. Attacked. Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers and Hit Pentagon in Day of Terror ’, other subheadlines announce: ‘A Creeping horror’; ‘President Vows to Enact Punishment for Evil’, ‘A Somber Bush Says Terrorism Cannot Prevail’ and ‘Awaiting the Aftershocks: Washington and Nation Plunge into Fight with Enemy Hard to Identify and Punish’. The articles in question also make extensive use of such terms which, in light of the upcoming events, hint at a possible manipulation of an already frightened audience into accepting the military intervention already decided by the administration.
However, I do not further analyse excerpts from the American press but instead turn to the British press, for two reasons: firstly, the front page of The New York Times is representative enough for the American press; secondly, the written press from Britain (more precisely, one of its most respected newspapers, The Guardian ), provides an interesting approach to the events of 9/11 through the eyes of a number of contemporary novelists. The question that arises is whether this enterprise brings fiction close to reality , making the novelists ‘snap out of their solipsistic daydreams’ so they could ‘attend, as best they could, to the facts of life ’ (Amis 2008, 13), or whether it is a subtle (and maybe involuntary) reversal of roles alluding to the immersion of fiction in reality . Three articles by Ian McEwan and Martin Amis are particularly pertinent in this respect; they will be considered in the following paragraphs, with the aim of establishing a connection with the fictional representations of the same historical event in the works of the respective authors.
British and American Representations of 9-11 Page 5
