It is difficult, in dealing with the mainstream catalogue of Banks , and even with his opera omnia, to ignore the aspects that may be suggestive of the obsolete biographical criticism. The author in question does not allow for his being written out, suppressed, or made secondary to the text, according to Roland Barthes’s proposal in the famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’. Without resorting to the metafictional/autobiographical technique of effectively imposing himself as a character in his novels (as is the case with Amis’s presence in Money), Banks writes himself into the text to such an extent that Barthes’s complaint that ‘the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centred on the author , his person, his life, his tastes, his passions’ (1977, 143) seems fully justified. One simply cannot disregard his political opinions loudly voiced in the press, or his Scottishness, both generators of a specific discourse , identifiable through ‘the relationships of homogeneity, filiation, reciprocal explanation, authentication’ (Foucault 2001, 123) established between his works. Thus, in Foucauldian terms, admitting that the author is intrinsic to the text, as a function of the latter, the name of the author is indicative of a specific discourse ‘regulated by the culture in which it circulates’ (124). However, from Foucault’s quote from Samuel Beckett, ‘what matters who is speaking?’ (115, 138), it follows that the function of an author ‘to characterize the existence, circulation and operation of certain discourses within a society’ (124) has little connection with the respective author’s social persona and more with the socio-cultural-political context . And yet, when one says Iain Banks , one says leftism, political criticism, anti-war/anti-Blair stances, advocacy of Scotland’s independence—all, easily traceable at the level of his literary discourse but not necessarily circumscribed to a general trend. In truth , in Banks’s case, more than in the case of many other contemporary authors , the ‘speaker’ actually matters.
Banks’s Scottishness, as a defining element of his fiction , has been emphasised in two monographs (Braidwood 2011; Colebrook 2012), although Colebrook does quote Banks as claiming, in a 1989 interview to belong to the English-speaking tradition rather than to the Scottish one: ‘I’m certainly part of the English language tradition. I’ve been a lot more influenced by Catch 22, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Tin Drum, and almost anything by Kafka, than by anything in Scottish literature apart from the single exception of Lanark’ (Banks in Colebrook 2012, 7; Colebrook and Cox 2013, 5). Excusing en passant the association of Gunther Grass and Franz Kafka with the English-speaking tradition, one cannot refrain from looking for American sources of inspiration in the construction of the plot, at least in what concerns the very ‘un-British’ flight of the main character from the vengeance of the cuckold gangster, which occupies, rather aimlessly, half of the novel . Nevertheless, denying the association with a particular national literature is one thing, but negating one’s national identity (and its associated rhetoric, to use Leerssen’s terms) is a completely different matter. Thus, with consideration to the author’s national identity, it needs to be stated that Banks’s Scottishness becomes apparent in many instances in the novel, either in reference to the 300-year hegemony of England over Scotland, or to the relation between the United Kingdom and the European Union, in which the latter is perceived as an oppressive, hegemonic superstructure created to expunge the national identity (an element of which appears to be the pound sterling). His Scottish, London-located narrator shows a sarcastic indifference to the Englishmen’s concern with their country’s adherence to the European Union , making at the same time a painful remark about Britain’s loss of its position as a world superpower:When we hear the English say: ‘We don’t want to be ruled from a distant capital where they speak differently from us and impose an alien currency on us’, we think: hold on, we’ve had that for three centuries. We’ve been there, we’ve had the conditioning, we’ve done the apprenticeship. London , Brussels, what’s to choose? Better to be wee and ignored in a potential superpower than wee and ignored in a post-imperial backwater where the only things that arrive on time are the corporate bonuses. (DA 136)
America is, for the most part, left out of these connections, which is why the following analysis of Dead Air centres on the imagotypical structures which constitute the background for the construction of the America’s image from the British perspective. The single instance in which it occurs in the conversations about the relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union is, nevertheless, a negative one. Reference is made to the pound as ‘a British dollar’, hardly worth preserving as ‘a vital part of our proud British culture’ (DA 132). Since the national currency has lost its identity and power , it would not be so serious a matter if it were replaced with the Euro, nor would this be an abandonment of national identity: ‘if the Germans can give up the Deutschmark, we can surely stop using bits of paper with the monarch’s head on them’ (132).
If the prejudicial standpoints about the United Kingdom , although numerous, appear later in the novel , Anti-Americanism is perceivable from the second chapter, whose title, ‘B is for Apple’, hints at the nickname of New York City . The references to America abound, proleptically, in this chapter, which ends with the news of the attacks on the WTC . The first allusions to British frustration at the Americanisation of their culture are present in the description of Jo, Ken’s girlfriend, a PR for a record label, with American looks: ‘today she was looking vaguely Drowned World-era Madonna-ish, with black tights, a short tartan skirt and an old leather jacket over an artfully ripped t-shirt’ (DA 4), and accent: ‘I didn’t like when Jo said ‘hon’. Thought it sounded like an affectation. […] She’d grown up in a posh bit of Manchester but she sounded like she was from somewhere between Manhattan and Mayfair’ (DA 6). American English seems to have conquered the heart of England, which, although not insisted on, seems like a disturbing effect of Americanisation, as is the case with the latest trends in interior design: ‘Kulwinder and Faye had leased half the top floor and turned into a big New York style loft; spare, echoing and vast’ (DA 5), or honeymoon choices: ‘they were honeymooning in the States; New York and Yosemite’ (6). Cultural aspects, however, are insignificant in comparison with the American politics-related issues that dominate the fictional public sphere and media discourse , which more or less make up the first part of the novel.
A representative piece of political discourse translated into the domain of fiction , Ken’s diatribe against George W. Bush and his alleged electoral fraud (DA 7) acquires a new dimension in the framework of analysis of the Western identity: in the words of the character, democracy must be restored in the United States. Thus, ‘our American cousins’ have lost an extremely significant trait of their ‘Western-ness’ since the Republicans’ victory in the presidential elections, so that ‘what happened last week [9/11] wasn’t an attack on democracy’ (DA 30). Although Ken’s role in the radio show is mainly to provoke, such a statement seems to hide more than a simple audience-triggering technique. While acknowledging common roots, the word cousin, associated with this annulment of democracy, seems to suggest the distancing from a budding Other . However, the two Wests remain united in the face of the common threat of the Muslim Other : ‘they’ve stopped them [the planes] flying over the city on the way into Heathrow. So another Mr Atta can’t crash-dive into the Canary Wharf tower or the Houses of Parliament’ (DA 31). The obsession with the attacks deepens among the British, increasingly aware of their status as Westerners and allies of the Muslim fundamentalists’ greatest object of scorn, the Americans . Also exploited in McEwan’s Saturday , the national dread of a potential terrorist attack is represented in Dead Air through the rendition of a rapid and sudden stream of thoughts triggered by the sight of the city from above, from the London Eye:I’d become quite worried on the way up; it had suddenly struck me that the Eye would be a perfect terrorist target. The supporting legs stretched out behind it […] and their supporting wires and cables suddenly appeared terribly
vulnerable. Jesus, I’d thought, a big enough bomb here, blowing the whole structure forward to fall into the river just a bridge away from Westminster […] but we were on the way down now, my atypical paranoia subsiding along with the gradually flattening view. (DA 177)
Therefore, it appears that the West remains the West in relation to its traditional counterpoint, the (Far) East . It is interesting, on the one hand, that paranoia has crossed the Atlantic Ocean, becoming a common element that characterises the Western mindset in the aftermath of the attacks on America . On the other hand, however, equally thought-provoking is the fact that the traditional East/West dichotomy has been transferred from the domain of alterity theorisation into the very real domain of history, politics and international relations. The East , although customarily regarded as mysterious, exotic and sensual-feminine by Westerners, has come to be considered by many a source of barbarism, absurd religious fundamentalism and violence after the most recent developments of history. The official agenda may struggle to make a distinction between Easterners and Muslims, and further, between Muslims and terrorists , but this is actually the East that the West unites against—it is the category which helps in the construction of the Western oneness/selfhood. In the absence of this antagonist relation, what is left to the Wests is to access their inner ‘othernesses’. In this context , the construction as Other of the American ‘big brother’ (or ‘cousin’, in the fictional text in focus here) by the European mindset has multiple justifications, from historical ones, (which remain ingrained at the level of the collective mind, with the specified amends along the years), to more topical (and more dangerous) hegemonic (if not downright imperialistic) patterns of dealing with international relations. Fiction , as already shown, has never jettisoned prejudicial standpoints transferred from reality , and it does not give them up in contemporary literature either. From this perspective, the anti-Americanism present in Banks’s novel has been deemed realist, although it acquires, at times, exaggerated overtones. Constructing a single character to whom exaggeration is meaningless by the very nature of his occupation, Banks forwards a worldview and an attitude which might have been better emphasised if the novel were more dialogical, that is to say, if polyphony had been introduced to express them. After all, paraphrasing Bakhtin , the epoch itself has made the polyphonic novel possible (1999, 27). If according to the same renowned critic, the novel ‘can be defined as a diversity of social speech types […] and a diversity of individual voices artistically organised’ (1981, 262), Dead Air escapes this definition. It provides, indeed, ‘speeches’ of a narrator and of some characters which permit ‘a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships’ (263), and Banks actually seems to struggle towards such an aim, through the introduction of ethnically and racially marked utterances, in the case of some characters (a black one and a Scottish one, whose dialogues are rendered in non-standard spellings so as to suggest their pronunciation). However, the intended dialogism seems subject to failure, since the only voice that is actually ‘heard’ along the entire novel is Ken’s—an authorial voice which deems the novel entirely monologic. All the other characters fulfil the sole function of passive listeners. Unfortunately, this monologism of Dead Air entails a predicament, in that it does not allow the identification of the British stereotyping of the Americans at the textual level: its xenophobic stances cannot be reasonably extrapolated beyond the worldviews of the individual who authors the novel, unless one is inclined to regard him, following the Foucauldian argumentation above, as a product of his culture and social environment.
Central to the discussion of anti-Americanism is a dialogue between Ken Nott and Mr Hecht, an American listener and participant in the former’s radio show, where ‘brave, brave people ring up to be insulted by a professional’ (DA 139). The comic effect, undoubtedly sought for, is acquired through the simplest technique of ridiculing the American other , who appears not only as extremely racist but also as brainwashed by political propaganda . Perhaps it is also meant to avenge the ‘Easternisation’ of the United Kingdom by the overpowering, Western, America. The American goes live to express his discontent at the significant number of Arab immigrants on the streets of London : ‘I could not believe that which I was hearing here in the city of London was not really coming out of Kabul or Baghdad’ (DA 69). His phobic attitude springs, unsurprisingly, from the very recent attacks on the WTC, in which the Americans lost ‘four thousand people in a morning’.9 The simpleton American ready to go to war without too much manipulative effort on the part of the authorities has become a stereotype since the involvement of America in the Iraqi-Kuwaiti conflict in the 1990s, and was heavily exploited in Michael Moore’s documentary film , Fahrenheit 9/11, which essentially claims that the American administration used the media to terrorise the population with the imminence of other threats from the Islamic world, and to persuade them that the war on terror was fully justified. By putting Bush’s words in the mouth of this secondary character with a single appearance in the novel , Banks somehow anticipates the ideas expressed in this controversial video documentary released in 2004. Furthermore, it seems that the representation is generalising, and therefore stereotypical for the whole nation.This is war. Don’t you understand that? It’s time to wake up. It’s time to choose sides. When the President said that you’re either for us or against us, he spoke for all decent Americans . Your Mr Blair’s chosen which side he’s on and we’d like to think he speaks for all decent English people, but I don’t know what side you think you’re on. It surely doesn’t sound like ours. (DA 69)
As apparent from Ken’s retort, the ‘decent English people’ are, nonetheless, less inclined to follow their prime minister as enthusiastically as their ‘cousins’ follow their president . A pertinent aspect of their opinion of the Americans is that the latter are positively regarded only in antithesis with the ultimate Other : they are construed as the lesser evil: ‘if the choice is between American democracy and murderous misogynists and a state governed by diktat and sharia, believe me, I am on your side’ (69, emphasis in original). Nevertheless, he specifically states that is not America in itself that he stands against, as America has a lot of positive traits—‘I love its freedoms, its celebration of free speech, its love of… betterment. It’s still the land of opportunity, I know that; there’s no greater place on Earth to be young and smart and healthy and ambitious’ (70). The enumeration of the good things about America continues with the beauty of its scenery and the multiplicity of cultures mixed in its melting pot (‘and is there any nation and ethnic group in the world not represented in the States?’ (70)). However, his declaration that ‘America is a world in itself’ supports all the old European prejudices with regard to Americans’ imperial carelessness towards all the other nations, and also to their isolation, although, at the first sight, it may seem just an attack on their limited intellect, which is also an ingrained prejudicial standpoint among the Europeans. Along the same lines, it is worth quoting here from Martin Amis’s similar observations made in an article published in The Guardian on 18 September 2001:Various national characteristics – self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in Western Europe , an assiduous geographical incuriosity – have created a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away. Most crucially and again most painfully, being right and being good support the American self to an almost tautologous degree: Americans are good and right by virtue of being American . (Amis 2008, 8)
In the eyes of Ken, the average American is naïve and fooled by the machinations of their illegitimate administration, which made them interiorise the self-delusional and absurd belief that America was attacked by terrorists out of jealousy: ‘twenty highly motivated men do not train for months to kill themselves in a meticulously planned and executed operation […] because you’ve got more domestic appliances that they do’ (DA 71). This sounds like an oversimplification of Noam Chomsky’s ‘Reflections on 9/11’ (2002), in which he states that
‘commentators generally prefer a more comforting answer: their anger is rooted in resentment of our freedom and love of democracy, their cultural failings tracing back many centuries, their inability to take part in the form of globalisation, and other such deficiencies’ (2008, 343).
British and American Representations of 9-11 Page 19
