Constructing a character that could not be more different from its real eponym as represented by the media and even by official accounts—9/11 CR describes the real Atta as ‘charismatic, intelligent, and persuasive, albeit intolerant of dissent’, having an ‘abrasive and increasingly dogmatic personality’ (2004, 160–1). Amis pushes the Other beyond the familiar boundaries of stereotyping towards the realms of the Great Unknown. Atta , a murderer in the name of his God, becomes in fiction Atta , the incomprehensible murderer driven by a ‘core reason’ which is not ‘jihadi ardour’ (TLD 101), but a mere hatred of everything—women, the West and its power (‘power was always a monster and there had never been a monster the size of America’, TLD 110), of himself and his peers, associated with sadistic pleasure: ‘the core reason was of course all the killing—all the putting to death’ (122).
Although the title announces a record of ‘the last days’, Amis’s short story captures only the final hours in the existence of the real man directly responsible for crashing a plane into the North Tower of the WTC. Corroborated with the cyclicity of the short story, which begins and ends with the exact same words: ‘On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m. in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta’s last day began’ (TLD 95; 124), the plural in the title may signify, as Kristiaan Versluys suggests, ‘the impossibility of coming to a closure’ (2009, 161), and, according to Däwes’s explanation, it may also point to metafictional practices: the narrative circuit, she says, ‘follows a metafictional trajectory: the story of the abject does not have closure; it needs to be re-told’ (2010, 506). In the light of Amis’s well-known fondness for metafiction, one may indeed admit that the author , present at times in the text (without effectively boarding the American Airlines Flight 11 or conversing with the perpetrators, but more covertly, through subtle authorial comments), denies Atta’s fall into oblivion, although what seems to remain rather unforgotten in the post-9/11 cultural memory is not the murderous personality of the terrorist but the very day of 9/11, which is relived over and over again through cultural and media artefacts.
The story is a mix of fact and fiction , without any relation to realism, Amis tracing Atta’s actions as they have been revealed by investigations, which is obvious from the motto of the short story, which cites the confusion of the ‘9/11 Commission Report’ apropos some of the motives of Atta and Omari’s movements:No physical, documentary, or analytical evidence provides a convincing explanation of why [Muhammad] Atta and [Abdulaziz al-] Omari drove to Portland, Maine from Boston on the morning of September 10, only to return to Logan on Flight 5930 on the morning of September 11. (The 9/11 Commission Report) (TLD 95)
Amis builds a fictional encounter with a dying imam in a Portland hospital to justify this detour, but otherwise the short story follows facts closely:Atta and Al-Omari check out of a Comfort Inn in Portland, Maine at 5:33 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. They drive to Portland airport, arriving at about 5:45 a.m., for a scheduled flight to Boston. They board a 6 a.m. commuter flight from Portland to Boston’s Logan Airport. Atta and Al-Omari board American Airlines Flight 11, for an 8 a.m. flight from Boston to Los Angeles. Atta, Al-Omari and others hijack Flight 11 at 8:14 a.m.; they crash it into the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8:46 a.m. (Newsday.com 2008)
Also factual, or, better said, intertextual, are the numerous quotes from various documents related to Muhammad Atta and his team members of assassins, some of them acknowledged—‘there was another document on the table, a four-page booklet in Arabic, put together by the Information Office in Kandahar’ (TLD 100) and ‘document number one was emblazoned on the screen of his laptop: it was his will and testament, composed in April 1996, when the thoughts of the group had turned to Chechnya’ (99). But there are also intertexts that entail a careful reading of documentary, as in the following example: ‘Why do you never laugh?’ he was sometimes asked. Ziad would answer: ‘How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine?’ Muhammad Atta never laughed, not because people were dying in Palestine, but because he found nothing funny. (TLD 102)
Similarly, when someone asked why he and Atta never laughed, Shehhi retorted: How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine? (9/11 CR, 162)
Entirely fictional, on the other hand, is the motivation of the terrorist , presented up to the very moment of the impact, when his determination and carelessness turn into regret: ‘where was that joy, that itch, that paltry tingle? Yes, how gravely he had underestimated it. How very gravely he had underestimated life’ (TLD 124). Narrated in the third person, the short story unwinds, at times, as an interior monologue, with frequent analepses which fill the gaps in the terrorist’s actions.
The fictional character of Muhammad Atta reveals a completely unreliable westernised reasoning. The stereotypical patterns of Western thinking about the Muslim Other are transposed into words and meanings that Muslims would never use to characterise themselves, which comes to support the assumption that the short story is intended to defamiliarise rather than to explain anything. For example, he questions the reward granted by the Qur’an, the virgins (see section Control Factors in Islamic Civilisations), relying on a Western theory on mistranslation, which claims that the promised virgins were actually raisins. The theory has been long debunked and, even if it were not, it is not something that a Muslim , a connoisseur of the Qur’an teachings since childhood, would accept. He even mocks at the idea: ‘how could he believe in such an implausibly, and dauntingly, priapic paradise?’ (TLD 102) Another instance of Western thought is the use of the word ‘terrorism’, which Arabs would never use to describe their deeds against the Christian West: ‘whatever else terrorism had achieved in the past few decades, it had certainly brought about a net increase in world boredom’ (TLD 108). Boredom is an overused concept in the long essay ‘Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind’ (2006, reprinted in the same volume, 2008, 47–93). Amis employs it there ‘not thinking of airport queues and subway searches’ but of ‘the global confrontation with the dependent mind’ (2008a, 78), also having in mind the perspective of the capitulation and universal conversion to Islam , which would bring about ‘a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else—a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the sole entertainment is the public execution’ (78). None of these understandings of the term seems in the least plausible when uttered by an Arab terrorist—which is why they are sooner read as authorial intrusions, like the commentary to Atta’s afterlife expectations: ‘He didn’t expect paradise. What he expected was oblivion. And, strange to say, he would find neither’ (TLD 102). Not only does the last sentence speak of Amis’s atheism; it also points to the transformation of the real Muhammad Atta into a media show after 9/11.
Atta’s fictional representation is, at the first glance, surprisingly irreligious:Muhammad Atta wasn’t like the others because he was doing what he was doing for the core reason. The others were doing what they were doing for the core reason, too, but they had achieved sublimation by means of jihadi ardour. […] Atta was not religious; he was not even especially political. He had allied himself with the militants because jihad was, by many magnitudes, the most charismatic idea of his generation. To unite ferocity and rectitude in a single word: nothing could compete with that. […] If you took away all the rubbish about faith, then fundamentalism suited his character with an almost sinister precision. (TLD 101)
As apparent from the quotation above, what Martin Amis seems to have in mind is precisely the deconstruction of the apologetic theory that fundamentalist Muslims act in accordance with a concert of factors that have influenced them since childhood. While acknowledging that ‘militant fundamentalism is convulsed in a late-medieval phase of its evolution’ (Amis 2008a, 9), which would entitle Said to rightfully accuse him of looking down on the Arabs, the British author chooses, nevertheless, to expose the terrorist acts as being triggered not by religious faith (‘jihadi ardour’) or ideological constraints and societal control, but by ‘
nihilistic insouciance’ (TLD 107). Their goal ceases to be their duty to Islam or their hatred against America ; it is simply the pleasure of killing, because ‘suicide mass-murder […] is a maximum malevolence’ (Amis 2008a, 71).
However, from Atta’s rambling interior monologue emerges the idea that the ‘joy of killing was proportional to the value of what was destroyed’ (TLD 124), which points in the direction suggested by Amis in the article ‘Fear and Loathing’/‘The Second Plane’: ‘an edifice so demonstrably comprised of concrete and steel would also become an unforgettable metaphor. This moment was the apotheosis of the postmodern era—the era of images and perceptions’ (Amis 2008a, 5). (The idea was also explored by philosophers Jean Baudrillard, in The Spirit of Terrorism (2003), and Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in their dialogues with Giovanna Borradori, Philosophies in a Time of Terror (2003)). The short story repeatedly emphasises the idea that the WTC towers were attacked because of their powerful symbolism, yet it is not certain whether the perpetrators had such thoughts or whether they simply directed the hijacked planes towards an easy target which presented the advantage of being overcrowded.
In the article quoted above, Amis also asserts that ‘all over again the West confronts an irrationalist, agonistic, theocratic/ideocratic system which is essentially and unappeasably opposed to its existence’ (2008a, 9), which shows that, although he was under the strong impression of the event, he managed at that point to see the influence of religion as a constraint, beyond the terrorist acts. However, the short story he wrote five years later is intent on othering the Other and on finding no excuses in their belonging to a society of ideological control. To this end, he deliberately dehumanises his character . Amis endows his Muhammad Atta with a blasphemous voice which carries overtones of his own controversial statement that ‘a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever; religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful’ (‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’ 2008a, 14); thus he completely annuls the chance for the character to be considered a victim of indoctrination (although facts about the life of the real Muhammad Atta indicate this specific aspect). The fictional character Muhammad Atta is just malicious. He is that ‘evil’ which President Bush claimed had tried ‘to frighten [the] nation into chaos and retreat’ (The New York Times 2001).
Thus, Amis’s short story is a literary representative of the Western pattern of presuppositions and stereotypes about the Muslim Other , one which not only acknowledges his alterity , but also highlights it. Nonetheless, it would be medievally naïve to regard Muslims just as evil-doers blinded by rage, and more reasonable to view their acts as a result of their exposure to a powerful state apparatus , namely religion.
Breaking into the Western World: Don Delillo’s ‘Falling’ Muslim Men
Terror and terrorism have become central concepts in the critical assessment of Don DeLillo’s works, partly due to his rather extensive catalogue dealing with this theme, and also because of the author’s statement that terrorism has been writing the narrative of the Western world: ‘Terror’s response is a narrative that has been developing over years, only now becoming inescapable. It is our lives and minds that are occupied now. This catastrophic event changes the way we think and act, moment to moment, week to week, for unknown weeks and months to come, and steely years’, wrote DeLillo in a press article, soon after 9/11 (In the Ruins of the Future [henceforth, Ruins], December 2001, 33). Born and raised in New York, DeLillo’s initial response to the attacks was not a far cry from the article published in The New York Times (16 September 2001) which argued that the terrorists had come into America to crush its system of freedom(s): ‘Our tradition of free expression and our justice system’s provisions […] can only seem an offence to men bent on suicidal terror’ (D eLillo, Ruins 34). Apparently, he sets out from the premise that ‘there is no logic in the apocalypse’ (34), and yet he is rummaging through the minds of the hijackers to look for it. As if to nuance Amis’s statement that we share no discourse with the terrorist’s mind, DeLillo constructs in Falling Man a narrative made up of two separate discourses, clearly delineated as ours and theirs, which only come together the moment the first plane crashes into the North Tower. Sharing no discourse would be less unsettling than a discursive (and a factual) clash. It would be that clear delimitation of selfhood from otherness theorised by Levinas, which is no longer possible in the context of globalisation and free circulation. The others are no longer the distant strangers whom one may only encounter by colonising and subjecting their space: they have broken into the Western world, bringing along their discursive control mechanisms and their Occidentalism [anti-Westernism].
Specifically, the three parts of Falling Man that feature the representation of Muslim terrorists , ‘On Marienstrasse’, ‘In Nokomis’ and ‘In the Hudson Corridor’, underline so artfully this irruption of the Other into the Western world that the literary undertaking as a whole may seem incondite to some. An entire choir of critics and reviewers have accused Falling Man of being poorly structured, and the three chapters in focus here are among the reasons leading them to this conclusion. It is, therefore, an aim of this section, aside from the obvious and overarching one—namely, that of discussing the presence of the Muslim Other in DeLillo’s contribution to post-9/11 fict ion—to demonstrate that the disruptive quality of the pages dedicated to the hijackers who led the planes into the WTC, far from being a flaw, is among the elements which construct and reinforce otherness.
An idea brought raised by De Lillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, the journalistic piece considered here as a reference point for the subsequent writing and publication of his post-9/11 novel , Falling Man, is that ‘the terrorists of September 11 want to bring back the past’ (2001, 34). But he does not seem to be referring to the 19 martyrs who flew the planes into New York and Washington in the name of Allah, but rather to the entire concert of Eastern forces whose actions led to the 9/11 outcome: ‘but now there is a global theocratic state, unboundaried and floating and so obsolete it must depend on suicidal fervour to gain its aims’ (Ruins 34). Metonymy or overgeneralisation, DeLillo’s choice of the word ‘terror ists’ may be associated with a mindset bent on Islamophobic attitudes, while his assertion that the Islamists are living in a past which they want to impose on the entire world may indeed fall under Orientalism , under that discursive representation of the East without having all the facts which Said imputed to the West , especially in the context of his patriotic/propagandistic reference to America as ‘the future’. The axis of time DeLillo imagines accentuates the difference between us (the Americans in his particular case, but standing for the entire Western civilisation) and them: neither we nor they are living in the present; contemporaneity could not be more relative.
A similar distancing may also be noticed at the level of the literary text. DeLillo’s Muslim Others populate three chapters completely alienated from the rest of the novel, which, bound together, could easily be read as a short story not too different from Amis’s The Last Days of Muhammad Atta, but whose relevance is revealed through the contrast they create with the main narrative, which focuses on the life of the American everyman after 9/11. The novel takes 9/11 as a temporal point of reference, but, while the Americans are presented after the fall of the two towers, while trying to cope with trauma and with the changes the attacks have brought their lives, the Muslim terrorists are depicted moving towards this event. On the same axis of time, 9/11 is the present; everything that takes place after it is the future; whereas everything before it is in the past. The only point when the two moments in time/civilisations collide is that of the crash, a symbolical contamination of the future with the horrors of the past. Versluys comes to a similar conclusion in his trauma-oriented analysis of Falling Man: ‘De Lillo indicates that September 11 can only be understood geopolitically as the clash of two opposing frames of reference, two worlds on a collision course’ (2009, 44). The narrative
of the terrorists’ preparations and arrival at the moment of the attacks is not woven or embedded into a main narrative frame; it is simply another narrative of another time. In a period dominated by the annulment of boundaries, the temporal alterity, their yesterday opposing our today or even our tomorrow, is far more significant than the spatial differences between East and West. As Dawes (2010, 510) notes, ‘space is no longer a reliable category’ in regard to the Self/Other dichotomy.
The titles of the three chapters under discussion designate places on the terrorists’ map, guiding them on their way to becoming suicidal martyrs: ‘On Marienstrasse’ refers to the apartment on 53 Marienstrasse, Hamburg, Germany where Mohamed Atta lived and plotted together with other future participants in the 9/11 attacks (9/11 CR, 162); ‘In Nokomis’ provides the spatial frame for the final nine months of preparations, including the perpetrators’ flight training. The locality is a small, suburban area near the city of Venice, Florida, whose name is not mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report, but which is occasionally mentioned by other sources as the residence of the 19 men. The most obvious source is Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers, Who They Were, Why They Did It, written by a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, Terry McDermott, which reads: ‘they rented, for $550 a month, a small pink stucco house in Nokomis, the next town north [from Venice FL], where they stayed for several months’ (2005, 195). DeLillo paraphrases: ‘they rented a little stucco house on West Laurel Road. […] The house was pink’ (FM 171). Lastly, ‘In the Hudson Corridor’ represents the flight route along the Hudson River in New York, which the American Airlines Flight 11 and the United Airlines Flight 175 also took until their deviation towards Manhattan and the crash into the towers. References to the Middle East and to the training camp in Afghanistan are present only in the form of analepses, in the terrorists’ thoughts or conversations, but otherwise the setting of these chapters is the Western space, which points to the Muslims’ breaking into the Western world, just as their insertion between the chapters dealing with America after 9/11 represents a disruption in the logical order of the narrative, not at all different from the disruption produced by the presence of the plane appearing on the Manhattan sky, ‘silver crossing blue’ (FM 236). Another argument which supports the hypothesis that DeLillo enhances otherness with the three chapters which focus on the Muslims is provided by two very small, but probably relevant elements of structure: on the one hand, the novel is divided into three parts, whose titles are names of people: ‘Bill Lawton’, which is a mispronounced variant of Bin Laden; ‘Ernst Hechinger’, the real name of Martin Ridnour, a character in the novel; and ‘David Janiak’, the name of ‘the performance artist known as Falling Man’ (FM 219), the ekphrastic leitmotif. Thus, all the titles point to identities—more or less real, but identities nevertheless. By contrast, the names of the chapters dealing with the Muslims are not eponyms but toponyms, so as to underline the importance of the setting and not that of the characters. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that, while the chapters in the three main parts run from one part to the next (the last chapter of ‘Bill Lawton’ is number five, the first chapter of ‘Ernst Hechinger’ is six), the chapters in between are neither numbered, nor even considered as belonging there. This may be additional proof that DeLillo probably assumed this apparent lack of structure on purpose, aiming to distance the Others as much as possible. Time allowed this separation, but space did not, which is why the distance is artificially created by the novel structure.
British and American Representations of 9-11 Page 27
