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Footnotes
1During the commemorative speech delivered on 11 September 2006, President Bush admitted that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center : ‘I am often asked why we are in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat. My administration, the Congress, and the United Nations saw the threat—and after 9/11, Saddam’s regime posed a risk that the world could not afford to take’ ( The Guardian , 12 September 2006).
2‘Mediatisation of politics is a complex process that is closely linked to the presence of a media logic in society and in the political sphere. It is distinguished from the idea of “mediation”, a natural, preordained mission of mass media to convey meaning from communicators to their target audiences. To define politics as “mediated” is a simple truism, in that communication and mass media are necessary prerequisites to the functioning of political systems’ (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999, 249).
3The distinction between Islam and Islamism is political and ideological. Strongly rooted in religion, Islamists support the implementation of Sharia law and the elimination of the Western influences from a unified Muslim world. Islamism is ‘political Islam’, ‘activist Islam’, ‘militant Islam’ or ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. This matter is to be elaborated in the Chap. 5.
4All references are made to the version included in the 2008 volume.
5The success of the book might have been at least partially enhanced by the excellent transposition into a feature film (2011) directed by Stephen Daldry (The Hours, The Reader), nominated for Best Motion Picture of the Year by the Academy Awards 2012.
© The Author(s) 2018
Oana-Celia GheorghiuBritish and American Representations of 9/11https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75250-1_3
3. Literary Rewritings of History and Politics After 9/11
Oana-Celia Gheorghiu1
(1)“Dunărea de Jos” University, Galati, Romania
The Rest is Silence: 9/11
This section focuses on Iain Banks’s Dead Air, a novel that features the attacks on the WTC in terms of the reactions the event triggered both in America and internationally, focusing on the role of the media . The intertextual embedding of the media sources, adding to the inherent fictionality of the literary production, is a common feature of contemporary literature, best outlined in Dead Air, whose analysis may seem, at times, divergent from traditional literary criticism . As Irving Howe, one of the most renowned exegetes of political fiction , put it in the introduction to his already classic Politics and the Novel, discussion of ‘political novels’ tends to differ in its focus from criticism of other forms of literature:The relation between politics and literature is not, of course, always the same, and that too is part of my subject: to show the way in which politics increasingly controls a certain kind of novel , and to speculate on the reasons for this change. The chapters on Stendhal and Dostoevsky contain a far heavier stress upon the literary side of things than do the chapte
rs on Koestler and Orwell. And, I think, with good reason. In a book like 1984 politics has achieved an almost total dominion, while such works as The Possessed and The Charterhouse of Parma cannot be understood without using traditional literary categories. (1987, 17)
However, since none of the novels featured in this study are as political as Orwell’s 1984—although they all share elements of political fiction—the following accounts will attempt to negotiate between two types of analysis in a hybrid approach intended to tackle both the ‘traditional literary categories’, and the representation of politics.
Fictional Media on Real Facts in Iain Banks’s Dead Air
In 2002, the Scottish novelist Iain Banks published Dead Air, a novel specifically set on the day of the 9/11 attacks. It was one of the earliest attempts to transpose the events at the WTC into fiction . Although this is worth bearing in mind, considering the great number of books about 9/11 that followed, it is not the only or defining factor behind its selection for analysis here. The arguments in favour of Dead Air were, as far as the author was concerned, its reflection of his own outspoken personality, his penchant for experimentation and ‘writing games’ (his works range from horror and science fiction utopias to Existentialist novels), and also his political activism. A notorious example in this last respect is his protest against the invasion of Iraq, in 2004, when he cut his passport into pieces and posted it to 10 Downing Street, arguing thatit was Blair’s war. There is the technicality of cabinet responsibility, but it was Blair who bowed to Bush in the first place, and Blair who convinced the Labour party and parliament of the need to go to war with a dossier that was so close to lying that it makes no difference. (The Guardian, 25 May 2007)
Such unequivocal statements permeate the catalogue of Banks’s literary productions in the twenty-first century, which proves—if further evidence were needed, as he has admitted it loud and clear—that his characters’ voices are filled with ‘vicarious ranting’ and ‘authorial opinion’ (Cambridge Student Online 2008). So much for ‘the death of the author’!
Dead Air has not received much attention from literary criticism—neither has the entire catalogue of Banks’s works, with a few notable exceptions, such as his science fiction series ‘Culture’ or his well-praised debut, the horror novel The Wasp Factory (1984). Perhaps the biggest problem in critically assessing Dead Air is whether one should consider it flawed, hasty, unbalanced in terms of plot, character construction and flow of ideas—a failed literary enterprise in short—or regard it as an inquiry into the changes in the political paradigm after 9/11, against the backdrop of an unconvincing thriller. While the novel may not be the best commercial thriller on the market, despite ticking the boxes of being easy to read, fun and adrenaline-fuelled (recommended, if not compulsory, for this genre), it constitutes a rewarding reassessment of contemporary politics and of the role of the media , in their fictional rewriting, reinterpretation or representation. The narrative construction, which establishes the setting as New York at the start of the novel, only to abandon it for most of the remainder of the plot, seems to suggest a simple philosophy of the ‘life goes on’ type—which would be in keeping with the assumption that British writers tend to treat the 9/11 events more lightly and in a more detached tone than their American confreres. In Banks’s case—and that of others—the events of 9/11 remain only in the background; life continues along the new coordinates that those events determined. This is exactly where the novel actually starts to gain the verisimilitude which Banks seems to have sought for it.
In the new political paradigm, in which the West feels threatened and obliged to retaliate against the menacing Other , Dead Air may be read as a novel about identity (and national identity), about the relationship between an average individual and history, about a shift in the collective mindset, about media manipulation and, of course, about politics. The latter is forwarded in unequivocal terms, using the media convention of the narrator-protagonist. Ken Nott is a Scottish leftist shock-jock whose role is to debunk and mock various political misconceptions conveyed to his audience by other media . Of course, 9/11 and the Muslim Other are often present in Ken’s conversations, and so is a wide range of other topical issues: the Scots and their relations to the United Kingdom , Euro-scepticism, racism, the Holocaust, globalisation , domestic affairs and so on. Banks’s novel , in common with many other pieces of contemporary literature ‘processes the cultural reality of today [and] carries the traces of identity/ politics, high technology, economy of reproduction, media capitalism […] being a powerful medium of communication, much like the other consecrated media’ (Praisler 2007, 463) into a metaliterary rapport with the nature of the world ‘as one made of story-tellers and their story-telling’ (462). Perhaps this is the reason why the protagonist is a journalist, after all—one ‘paid to be controversial or just plain rude’ (Banks 2002, 88, henceforth DA), who is capable of discussing sensitive political issues, and who is likely to trigger reactions with his sarcastic commentaries. One may actually assert that Ken Nott, beyond his insufferable character and his never-ending sexual and alcoholic engagements, is constructed as a perfect embodiment of a public sphere representative.
Banks’s use of metaphor and allusion seems to have been limited to the title in this case. Dead Air ‘is the terrifically technical term […] radio boffins use for silence’ (DA 29), but in combination with the symbolic visual representation of two towers with a plane flying above them, used as a powerful paratextual element on the front cover, the phrase rather seems to connote the smoke and ashes filling up the New York sky after the collapse of the two towers, or, more directly, death . The towers are actually the chimneys of an old factory in London , which may be read as gesturing ‘in the direction of urban pollution and desolation’ (Praisler 2007, 460).
The novel begins at a wedding party held in London, in an exquisite apartment in the expensively minimalist, Manhattan style, whose newly married owners are to spend their honeymoon in New York, starting the following day. This seems like a subtle critique of the Americanisation at the heart of England, a reaction triggered, among other reasons, by the electoral fraud that helped George W. Bush win the elections and accede to the White House. Jo, Ken’s official girlfriend (‘official’, because there are other women in his life), complains that he is not willing to visit America:I shrugged. ‘I was thinking I might wait until democracy had been restored.’
Kulwinder snorted. ‘You really don’t like Dubya, do you?’
‘No, I don’t, but that’s not the point. I have this old-fashioned belief that if you lose the race you shouldn’t be given the price. Getting it handed to you because of electoral roll manipulation , the police in your brother’s state stopping the black folks from voting, a right-wing mob storming a counting station and the Supreme Court being stuffed with Republican fucks is called… gosh, what’s the technical term? Oh, yeah, a coup d’état’. (DA 7)
The statement above accurately summarises the controversial moments of the United States of America elections, at the end of the year 2000, and makes use of a particularly blunt, undiplomatic term, coup d’état, which is more usually employed in reference to the removal of dictators of remote, less developed countries. The argument that the president of the United States, the most powerful man on Earth and the champion of democracy, as American propaganda runs , has come to power by resorting to dishonest measures, with the support and approval of the Supreme Court, is one that governs all the political remarks that the character—whose construction does not even try to divert from the opinions expressed by the author in the media —will make, each and every time, in reference to America . Later in the novel , during a cross-cultural dialogue with an American visiting London , Ken Nott further emphasises that he has a problem with ‘anybody who voted for the man claiming to be [their] president’ (DA 70), and openly asserts that the attacks on the WTC w ere triggered by the meddling of the American and Israeli administrations in Middle East affairs:to them it’s ev
ery corrupt, undemocratic regime the United States has poured money and arms into since the last war, propping up dictators because they’re sitting on a desert full of oil and helping them crush dissent; it’s the infidel occupying their holy places and it’s the unending oppression of the Palestinians by America’s fifty-first state. That’s the way they see it. (DA 71)
To return to the initial moment of the attacks, the news of which ends the second chapter, and most probably the party, the time and date is artfully introduced together with a hint at the communication breakdown which modern communication devices are prone to. Everyone’s mobile phone starts ringing, as if ‘for some bizarre reason everybody […] had set alarms for a little after two o’clock on a Tuesday in September’ (DA 23). The fragments of conversation give the now-aware reader a glimpse of what the characters have just found out, but, in the economy of the text, they seem to be intended to show confusion, much in the way it actually happened after the attacks:‘Yo, Phil,’ I said. Amy answered her call too.
‘What?’
‘What?’
‘New York?’
‘The what?’
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