The conversation is constructed so as to reveal the communication breakdown between generations: Daisy comments that the few people she knows to be pro-war are over forty, while her father accuses the younger people of having been blinded by the commodities of the twenty-first century:The genocide and torture, the mass graves, the security apparatus , the criminal totalitarian state – the iPod generation doesn’t want to know. Let nothing come between them and their ecstasy clubbing and cheap flights and reality TV. But it will if we do nothing. […] Radical Islam hates your freedom. (S 197)
Dominic Head asserts that ‘it is hard not to see some affinity between McEwan and Perowne’ (2008, 188), claiming that the character seems to share many of Ian McEwan’s views on literature , science, and evolution Perowne reveals his hatred towards all the Arab nations: ‘It’s not just Iraq. I’m talking about Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, a great swathe of repression, corruption and misery’ (S 188). This is not to suggest that the British novelist may be driven by an irrational combination of racism and Islamophobia , but simply to account for the textual evidence that, after 9/11 , people have started to feel threatened indiscriminately by the Middle East , a region which they associate, conscientiously or not, with terrorism.
A good example of the way in which ordinary people have become accustomed to the notion of terrorism as an inherent menace to their civilisation is rendered in the opening chapter of Saturday , in which Henry Perowne wakes up to see a burning plane in flight over London , heading to Heathrow. One of his first thoughts is that he is witnessing a terrorist attack: ‘in fact, the spectacle has the familiarity of a recurrent dream’ (S 14). An interesting choice of words: already aware of the fact that ‘it’s almost eighteen months since half the planet watched, and watched again, the unseen captives driven through the sky to the slaughter’ (S 15), the character construes the attacks as an artistic performance. His motivation calls to mind psychoanalytical interpretations of the defence mechanisms that are not actuated, since trauma has not been felt directly. It is thus implied that one cannot encompass the proportions of a tragedy unless one has direct sensorial access to it. McEwan’s view of the distant tragedy at the WTC has already been presented in the subchapter dedicated to the media , but it is worth placing the fictional and non-fictional side by side: The screaming, the heroism and reasonable panic, the fumbling in semi-darkness for mobile phones – it was our safe distance from it all that was so horrifying. No blood, no screams. […] We were watching death on an unbelievable scale, but we saw no one die . (McEwan in The Guardian, 2001 my emphasis)
This is the other familiar element – the horror of what he can’t see. Catastrophe observed from a safe distance. Watching death on a large scale, but seeing no one die. No blood, no screams, no human figures at all, and into all this emptiness, the obliging imagination set free’. (McEwan 2005, 15 my emphasis)
People have acquired the ability to adapt to insecurity and to the threats of future tragedies—they no longer flee from reality , but wait for reality to fade: ‘like any other crisis, this one would fade soon, and make way for the next, going the way of the Falklands and Bosnia, Biafra and Chernobyl’ (S 33) However, the characters in Saturday are informed people: they buy books about 9/11 , in which they read that ‘the New York attacks precipitated a global crisis that would, if we were lucky, take a hundred years to resolve’ (33). This book, intertextually alluded to only through the name of its author , is, probably, Fred Halliday’s Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001: Causes and Consequences (2001), although Halliday does not provide such a precise period of time: ‘the consequences of 11 September will stretch far into the future’ (Halliday 2001, 12). Since the author was a renowned expert in the politics of the Middle East, mentioning him may be understood as an appeal to authority, which comes to reinforce the source that people tend to consider authoritative these days: the press. The Perownes, father and son, are waiting for the news on television in search for information about the burning plane, just as Ian McEwan and his son browsed the news channels in 2001: ‘“You think it’s jihadists…?” […] “I don’t know what I think,” Henry says. “It’s too late to think. Let’s wait for the news.”’ (S 33–4).
The news eventually brings the somehow unsatisfactory information that the plane was burning only because of a fire that had broken out in one of its engines. The second time the news is broadcast, it is no longer the first item on the newscast, which gives the narrator the chance to share an introspective view on the nature of the circulation of information:The fading life-chances of a disappointing news story—no villains, no deaths , no suspended outcome—are revived by a dose of manufactured controversy: an aviation expert has been found who’s prepared to say that it was reckless to bring a burning plane in over a densely populated area when there were other options. A representative of the airport authority says there was no threat to Londoners. The government is yet to comment. (S 69)
What the news programmes achieve by adding such extra information when the news has turned out not to be worthy of extensive coverage is, in the end, a plunge into the world of simulacra, a fictionalisation of the irrelevant events, which is accepted by viewers, almost as in a pacte de lecture. This is also a strategy for Ian McEwan, as it was for Virginia Woolf in the early years of the previous century—although reversed, in their cases: they do not try to enhance the reality surrounding their fiction , but to belittle it.
The war on terror , still in progress at this moment, although without the determination it began with, has shaped the mindset of Western civilisation in two directions, which may be traced at the level of the two fictional texts discussed above, Hare’s Stuff Happens and McEwan’s Saturday : on the one hand, it has contributed to the spread of phobia against the Arabs, regarded by many as terrorists ; on the other hand, it has revealed many aspects of Western political and media manipulation . ‘Wars of words’ may follow the wars of the world closely, as in David Hare’s case, or, on the contrary, they may constitute an intellectual refuge from reality , as with McEwan . Whatever the case, facts can no longer be ignored—and this is not only about political engagement, as in Banks’s case, but also about the focus on ‘the demanding re-enactment of the plausible’ (S 66), which is much more challenging for both writer and reader.
Conclusions
The aim of this part of the book has been to account for the close relation between fiction and reality on the twenty-first century stage, in the realms of both fiction and non-fiction. A general opinion, which this analysis has attempted to prove obsolete, is that fiction has its own separate domain, completely divorced from a reality that, while not outside the text, is composed of and transmitted by non-fictional texts. The direction of this undertaking has been set by the literary theories selected to guide textual interpretation, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, which do not favour the literary text, and advocate for a Foucauldian understanding of any text as representation . Avoiding the trap of naïvely regarding literature as a credible mirror of reality , into which one may fall when structuring the analysis from context to text (as is, indeed, the case here), the chapters so far have striven to prove that the reality–fiction relation is a bidirectional exchange, that is to say that what appears to be reality may well be fictional (or fictionalised, at least), as a direct consequence of various factors, which range from the political interests and propaganda that accompany them, to the mere lack of accurate information—either in the form of misinformation or disinformation.
The narratological grid, traditionally relegated to fictional prose, when applied to a CNN broadcast, the comparison of the ‘plot’ of their Breaking News to a novel’s beginning, and novelists’ discussions of press articles, is able to connect fictional and non-fictional discourse, thereby debunking the objectivity and the pretence to conveying the truth with which the latter has been customarily associated. Along the same lines, the literary texts in focus have been dealt with, for the most part, from the pe
rspective of their relation to contemporary history, drawing a parallel not with the elusive notion of ‘historical truth’ (that would be particularly difficult, since such a thing cannot be determined), but with the ‘textuality of history’, with the way the latter is forwarded through texts. The conclusion drawn at this point is that fact and fiction are indeed not connected, but their disconnection transcends the world of literature . They are truly indistinguishable, in the media and in political discourse alike.
The choice of approaching the representation of present-day history in texts belonging to the category of 9/11 fiction has been fruitful, in that this genre provides numerous instances of political and media discourse , sometimes even transposed word for word into the literary text. The next step is to discuss the way in which ideology informs both fiction and non-fiction , and the way in which these two, in turn, construct or, at least, affect identities.
References
Adams, Ann Marie. 2012. Mr McEwan and Mrs Woolf: How a Saturday in February Follows ‘This Moment in June’. Contemporary Literature 53 (3): 548–572. University of Wisconsin.Crossref
Bal, Mieke. 2009. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Banks, Iain. 2002. Dead Air. London: QPD.
———. 2008. A Chat with Iain Banks. Cambridge Student Online. Available from http://www.iainbanks.net. Accessed 22 Aug 2013.
BBC World News. 2003. Million March Against Iraq War. BBC World News, February 16. Available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2765041.stm. Accessed 30 June 2014.
Blix, Hans. 2003. Briefing of the Security Council, February 14. Available from http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/recent%20items.html. Accessed 30 Oct 2014.
Currie, Mark. 2007. Fictional Knowledge. In About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, 107–136. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Deeney, John. 2006. David Hare and Political Playwriting: Between the Third Way and the Permanent Way. In A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama 1880–2005, ed. Mary Luckhurst, 429–440. London: Blackwell.Crossref
Genette, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
———. 1993. Fiction and Diction. Trans. C. Porter. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Golimowska, Katharina. 2012. Transatlantic Miscommunication in David Hare’s Drama Stuff Happens. COPAS: Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, Regensburg, vol. 13.
Groes, Sebastian, ed. 2009. Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. New York: Continuum.
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Hare, David. 2004. Stuff Happens. London: Faber and Faber.
Hayes, Stephen. 2003. Case Closed. The Weekly Standard, 24November, vol. IX, No. 11. Available from http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/378fmxyz.asp. Accessed 25 May 2014.
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Footnotes
1Department of Defense News Briefing—Secretary Rumsfeld and General Meyers, 11April 2003, Available from http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2367 Accessed on 17 March, 2014.
2Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, declared in his report to the UN Security Council, on 14 February 2003, that they could not identify any compelling evidence that Iraq had hidden nuclear weapons. The report is available on the United Nations website.
Part II
Ideological Reconfigurations of Identity in the Literary Representations of 9/11
© The Author(s) 2018
Oana-Celia GheorghiuBritish and American Representations of 9/11https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75250-1_4
4. The Shattered Self of the West
Oana-Celia Gheorghiu1
(1)“Dunărea de Jos” University, Galati, Romania
Retracing Developments in Alterity Studies
In a world aspiring to a globalisation that traverses economic and political boundaries, and aiming at cultural unity and the cancellation of differences of race, ethnicity, gender and so on, denominated with apprehensive terms like racism, nationalism, sexism, the hegemonic discourses of politics and the mass media, or more marginal ones such as the literary one, manage to construct and forward a representation of present-day reality acutely marked by these differences. In light of their power to manipulate and impose certain worldviews, the result may not be unification, but, on the contrary, a more pronounced separation and (self-)centricity, or, to use Spivak’s coinage (1985, 252), to othering.
Any contemporary political discussion, whether referring to local or global issues, to less or more significant consequences at the level of societal and ideological developments, touches, almost unavoidably, on the question of duality, and, from that, of alterity . The idea of identity and otherness has become central to practically all the studies in the humanities, scholars of all kinds of schools and formations tending to come to an agreement on the basic notion that identity (with its inherent subcategories of appurtenance to various artificially and/or socially constructed groups) enters a relation of opposition with a different element, which is—psychologically and culturally—regarded as secondary, of lesser importance, or even as inferior. This opposition occurs, as Simone de Beauvoir remarked (in relation to gender, which is outside the scope of this study, but equally valid, nevertheless, for the opposing categories under the lens here, West and East mainly, but also nations and religions ), as soon as one has acknowledged his/her oneness: ‘otherness is a fundamental category of the human thought. Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself’ (1956, 16). Exemplifications of the dichotomic pairs have known various shapes, usually in accordance with the principle of regarding the former element as the norm, the reference.
Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), a leftist sociological study with an interest in ‘the stranger’ and his impact on modern societies, written by Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist heavily indebted to Derrida’s theorisations of différance, draws upon this prevalence of the former element of the duality relation:The second member is but the other of the first, the opposite (degraded, suppressed, exiled) side of the first and its creation. Woman is the other of man, animal is the other of human, stranger is the other of native, abnormality the other of norm, deviation the other of law-abiding […] insanity the other of reason, foreigner the other of state subject, enemy the other of friend. (1991, 8)
A caveat is necessary at this point: the two positions are always interchangeable, as every latter element of the pair regards itself as the self, and, implicitly, the former as the Other . A statement such as ‘I am the Other’ only shows the acknowledgment of one’s own socially constructed position, in certain circumstances and in relation to certain others , and not an actual acceptance of one’s inferiority.
This clash of identity and otherness manifests itself at the level of international relations to various degrees: acute or extreme alterity which may easily escalate (generating violence, wars, diplomatic conflicts, terrorist attacks and other consequences) but also less radical ‘othernesses’ , which may be best characterised through relations such as hegemony/subalternity or coloniser/colonised. The latter terms seem obsolete in the present context —as is the case with the theory of their relation, namely postcolonialism —since the geopolitical configuration of the world no longer separates the nations according to such a distinction. Nonetheless, when drawing on theoretical methodologies of politicised otherness , one can hardly ignore the postcolonialists’ demonstrations of how the mightier impose their own image/representation on the (lesser) Other , which is firstly silenced and then reconstructed. Under the circumstances, it is probably better to use the term neocolonialism, which suggests that ‘the ex-colonial powers and the new emerging superpowers such as the United States continue to play a decisive role through international monetary bodies […] multinational corporations and cartels and a variety of educational and cultural institutions’ (Ashcroft et al. 1998, 162). The two prefixes, post- and neo-, may also be read as ‘after-colonialism’ , which may seem adequate at a first glance. However, since ‘the age of empire’, the dynamics of power have changed to such an extent that the reference to this particular historical reality seems futile. Along these lines, the present discussion centres on identity and otherness , but for the most part avoids their approach from a postcolonial theoretical perspective.
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