17In an interview published by the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag in 2002, Atta Senior claimed that his son had been framed by the Mossad to appear as one of the hijackers, but that he was still alive and into hiding. Connolly, K. (2002) ‘Father insists alleged leader is still alive’. The Guardian, 2 September 2002. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/02/september11.usa [24 October 2015].
18‘Disbelief. A significant concept in Islamic thought, the word kufr or one of its derivatives appears in the Quran 482 times. Also means ‘ingratitude,’ the wilful refusal to appreciate the benefits that God has bestowed’ (Esposito 2003, Oxford Dictionary of Islam).
19On a side note, this very specific reference to the War on Terror provides the best argument against Waldman’s pretences to have written a novel which does not belong to the category of 9/11 fiction.
20After having been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for The Reluctant Fundamentalist , Mohsin Hamid was again shortlisted for the same award in September 2017 for his most recent novel, Exit West.
© The Author(s) 2018
Oana-Celia GheorghiuBritish and American Representations of 9/11https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75250-1_6
6. Afterthoughts
Oana-Celia Gheorghiu1
(1)“Dunărea de Jos” University, Galati, Romania
The afterlife of an event is a form of transference of things past from the domain of yesterday into that of today (while also opening a window towards tomorrow), in an urge to remember, to revisit, to reiterate or to understand what once happened. It begins by creating immediate effects, and especially by being brought into the discursive sphere. It is no longer there, but continues to exist through its representations, whose raisons d’être are manifold. One can hardly speak of representation just for representation’s sake, to paraphrase a famous empty slogan of the nineteenth century. It may appear due to this allusion that representation is just another word for art. It is not. It is more likely the other way around: any kind of art is representational, in various degrees of verisimilitude to what is represented, but it is not only art that offers representations. This is one of the reasons why not one but multiple forms of representing the same event are responsible for recreating it over and over again in the cultural memory. The attacks of 9/11, history-changing in their magnitude and effects, have been inscribed in a continuum of representations which began the very moment the media started to broadcast live from the scene of the disaster. This is hardly novel, if one thinks of Barthes’s observation made in the midst of the events of 1968, that ‘every national shock produces a sudden flowering of written commentaries’ (1989, 149). The media were the first to create and transmit an image of what had just happened, and this image soon started to be written. They too have the credit for giving the event a name that stuck: 9/11, an Americanism considered a measure of the unqualifiable due to its brevity and unrepresentativeness (Derrida 2005, 86). It has now become representative and, what is more, has entered current usage, spreading to other creators of representation. Politics followed shortly after, although the very first political statement that was made shocked its audience with its lack of the customarily formal language required by this type of discourse , which, on a secondary note, points to the high degree of destabilisation induced by the unexpectedness of the attacks. When President George W. Bush said that America was going ‘to hunt down and find those folks who committed this act’, he initiated a series of speeches and written documents which constructed an image of a great enemy of America but also of the rest of the world. His administration’s goals are now well known, and it is also known that they were pursued without regard for the evidence and, to some extent, the opinions of America’s allies and of the great popular demonstrations against the war in Iraq. This is not the place to elaborate on the rights and wrongs of the American administration and of NATO in managing the global situation after 9/11; what seems relevant at this point is that political discourse has manipulated history by advancing a mosaic truth constructed of bits and pieces of unrelated or barely related images: Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the 19 hijackers on the four planes, Afghanistan and the Taliban regime, Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction he allegedly possessed, as a threat to a world peace that ironically had to be defended through various wars. Aside from what is intended for insiders’ ears only, political discourse is usually transmitted to the public sphere via the media , which is why the bond between these two is indissoluble. Politics and the media need and support each other in sending messages ranging from manipulation and speculation to fiction unacknowledged as such. It is also through these discourses that an ideological reconfiguration is constructed, bringing to the fore and sharpening the differences between civilisations and within the same civilisation. A third type of representation, namely the artistic one, cannot be on an equal footing, as it is, more often than not, intertextual, borrowing from both politics and the media . The points of convergence are the unreality (fictio nality) and the ideology that these discourses forward, which subvert the position of the non-fictional discourses as conveyors of truth and reduce the gap between their role at a societal level and the role of literature as a cultural apparatus of social and historical significance.
The narratives of 9/11 , far from making up the cohesive whole that should characterise a literary genre, have, nevertheless, been collected under an umbrella, a subgenre alternatively called ‘post 9/11 fiction’ or simply ‘9/11’ fiction, the prefix having been lately dropped as superfluous. What is more, a canon has already been established, based on the choices made by the earliest critical assessments of the subgenre. The literary texts are eclectic in their negotiation of a postmodernism which still lingers and ‘experimentalisms’ manifest especially at the level of narrative techniques and time manipulation , on the one hand, and a trenchant return to activist realism, on the other. Whether they mention the events of 9/11 in some detail or just dwell on their implications, these texts are political and activist, traumatic and/or (un)sympathetic of America , inspired by new ideologies, and often regarded as Orientalist/Islamophobic. Their reading, supported by a rather diverse theoretical apparatus and assimilation of what the media have to say on the matter, and to occasional squints into the authors’ opinions, has proved that this subgenre revolves around this thematic configuration. Deliberately seeking to include texts that encompass as many of the aspects above as possible, the corpus provides instances ranging from political manifestoes grounded in the real world (Amis , Banks , Hare , Waldman ) to trauma-driven flights from reality (DeLillo , Mc Ewan). It is important to note that both categories include at least some elements from the other.
9/11 fiction is a marginal subgenre of contemporary fiction, if one counts the number of fictional works published since 2002, and at the same time, a significant one, considering the reputation of many of the authors who have approached it so far. This is the reason why it has drawn the attention of many literary scholars, while also being taught as a stand-alone course in some faculties of letters, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It is, then, hardly negligible, although it is too soon to determine whether the subgenre has found or will find a steady place among war literatures. Although the 9/11 historemes are preponderantly set in the cityscape of New York, but also in London , Paris , Cardiff and so on, this superordinate seems to suit it even better than that of ‘urban fiction’ because the world has interpreted the attacks as a genuine declaration of war against America and because of the Western counteroffensive known as the ‘war on terror’. In fiction , this translates as an alternative/possible urban world trying to cope with the horrors of the past while expecting the worst from the future. A relevant point in this respect is made by Ian McEwan’s Saturday , with its representation of the urban everyman’s fears and uncertainties, and by David Hare’s Stuff Happens , with its image of the political actors of today and of their appetite for starting not just a war of retr
ibution, but one of an imperialistic and hegemonic nature. The two texts are less concerned with 9/11 itself than with the war on terror , but neither they nor the other texts surveyed—except for Amis’s, which exclusively focuses on the terrorists prior and during the attacks—miss the chance of designing the Western urban landscape caught in the still image of a world at war. In close relation to this atmosphere, trauma takes over the Western collective mindset, insinuating itself into all discursive levels. Ordinary people, press, politicians and authors of fiction relive and reimagine the attacks over and over again, textualising them in an attempt to relegate them to a world of fiction and bringing them to the fore in the constant terror that they might be repeated at any time. It soon becomes apparent, when the American texts are contrasted with the Europeans ones, that pain, fury and terror are more acute at the heart of the storm, in the United States of America, the Western country the Muslim terrorists chose as a target for both material and symbolic purposes. The American literary texts, older and newer, re-enact to various extents the terror of that day and the implications it had on the survivors’ psyche and behaviour. The attacks cut deep at the level of the winner’s mentality of the Americans and created aversion for people of the same ethnicity/religion with the perpetrators. At the same time, while the initial shock was felt with equally great intensity on the other shore of the Atlantic, as proven by the media reactions documented (the editorial in the French newspaper Le Monde , the Writers on 9/11 series in The Guardian and so on), there are reasons why European literary representations of 9/11 appear less traumatic than the American ones. The first is psychological: no matter how powerful a shock is, it affects less and wears off more easily when it does not affect one directly, when it is mediated and attenuated by distance. The second is in keeping with the historical tradition of anti-Americanism that characterises the Western European powers to various extents, and which is considered by sociologists and political scientists alike to have become accentuated towards the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, when America had consolidated its position as the sole superpower. The attitudinal patterns, which vary from indifference to the American tragedy to Schadenfreude, are decipherable at the textual level of the British fictional works analysed.1 Ian Mc Ewan’s Saturday is so self-centredly English that America seems too far an entity from this Englishness to count in any way.2 In fact, in this case, the tragedy is appropriated and interiorised, as a result of the political context , which drew the United Kingdom closer to becoming a terrorist target through its involvement in the war on terror. Iain Banks’s novel Dead Air provides instances of European superiority and criticises the American people and government for making 9/11 happen through their past actions and is quick to leave the event in the background. Lastly, David Hare’s play Stuff Happens points to another dimension of the selfhood/otherness dichotomy which manifests within the West , and which splits the Western identity into a multiplicity of selves. This time, the approach is that of a subaltern criticising the shortcomings of a hegemon. In Stuff Happens , America is no longer the victim hit by an enemy, which should be sympathised with; it is no longer a part of the West that needs to fear the attacks coming from the East; it is no longer a cause for these attacks. It is the hegemon whose power is dreaded.
However, this entire reconfiguration of the Western self and the mutability of the selves which comprise it is annulled when placed in relation to a more distant and more threatening other. Islamophobia , a constant of Western civilisation since the dawn of the Middle Ages, increases (naturally, one may add) after the devastating impact of the planes crashed into the WTC, and the Wests close ranks against Islam, leading to paranoid representations of all Muslims as terrorists. Against a background of heavy stereotyping in the press and in the public sphere, while politicians inadequately try to make the distinction between the average Muslim man and the suicidal terrorist clearer, a minority of literary works ascribable to 9/11 fiction employ this figure of otherness as a character , thus exposing themselves to criticism and accusations of Orientalism or of insensitivity to the Western tragedy . Dehumanised and evil, as Mohamed Atta in Martin Amis’s short story, manipulative, as Amir, in Falling Man, or, on the contrary, depicted as a normal individual fallen prey to the devastating effects of religion mingling with the political, as is the case with Hammad, the other Muslim character in D eLillo’s novel , the Muslim terrorist is, in all cases, subject to distancing and defamiliarisation, which shows that his presence in the gallery of literary portraits has never been intended as anything else than a realistic representation of the dichotomy that exists in the world at the moment, paradoxically mingling non-realist techniques, cliché and stereotype . Nevertheless, a concession to realism is the presence in 9/11 fiction of Muslim characters who are not terrorists but normal, innocent people, as Waldman’s Khan or Hamid’s Changez, caught in an East–West war that is heavily influenced, at the level of mentality, by discourse and representation , apart from its being a reality of the twenty-first century.
9/11 fiction , with its politicised, thought-provoking realism, its interplay of reality and fiction , its descriptions of a warlike atmosphere of terror and its departures from what is, in a desperate plunge into what should have been, is one of the hallmarks of contemporary literature worthy of a readership increasingly interested in keeping up with the ways of the world, as well as in paying critical attention to current events. After all, not many events in world history have a literature of their own.
References
Barthes, Roland. 1989. The Rustle of Language. Trans. R. Howard. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Carrell, Severin. 2012. ‘I Am an English Writer, Not a British One, Ian McEwan Tells Alex Salmond’. The Guardian, August 22. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/22/ian-mcewan-not-a-british-writer. Accessed 11 Mar 2016.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge.
Footnotes
1Martin Amis’s The Last Days of Muhammad Atta has been disregarded in this respect.
2The author does not even accept being considered British but English: ‘I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I’m an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.’ Ian McEwan in Carrell, August 2012.
Annexes
Timelines
Table A.1The events of 9/11
7:46 a.m. a
American Airlines Flight 11 departs from Boston, MA with Mohamed Atta and four other hijackers aboard
8:14 a.m. (estimated)
The hijacking of Flight 11 begins
8:14 a.m.
United Airlines Flight 175 departs from Boston, MA with 56 passengers and five hijackers aboard
8:20 a.m.
American Airlines Flight 77 departs from Washington, DC with 59 passengers and crew and five hijackers aboard
8:42 a.m.
United Airlines Flight 93 departs from Newark, NJ after a 45-minute delay
8:46:40 a.m.
American Airlines Flight 11 hits 1 WTC (the North Tower)
8:48 a.m.
CNN is the first television network to break the news of the attack
9:03:11 a.m.
United Airlines Flight 175 hits 2 WTC (the South Tower)
9:28 a.m.
The hijackers, led by Ziad Jarrah, infiltrate the cockpit of Flight 93
9:37 a.m.
The west wall of the Pentagon is hit by American Airlines Flight 77
9:55 a.m.
Air Force One is airborne, heading to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana with President Bush and VP Cheney
9:57 a.m.
The passengers and crew on Flight 93, informed by the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, begin their counterattack
9:58:59 a.m.
The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses within ten sec
onds
10:02 a.m.
Flight 93 crashes on a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It is believed that its target was either the White House or the Capitol
10:28:25 a.m.
The North Tower of the World Trade Center collapses
2:50 p.m.
Air Force One lands at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska
3:15 p.m.
President Bush meets with his main advisers in a secured videoconference, in which George Tenet, Director of the CIA, claims that the signs indicate that Al-Qaeda was involved in the attacks
8:30 p.m.
President Bush addresses the nation from the White House and then meets with the National Security Council (NSC)
a All the hours in this timeline are EDT (UTC−4)
Table A.2Fatalities
WTC
2973 people (343 FDNY officers, 34 PAPD officers, 23 NYPD officers)
Pentagon
64 people aboard the airliner, 125 inside the Pentagon (70 civilians and 55 military service members)
Pennsylvania
33 passengers, seven crew members and four hijackers
Table A.3Preparations for the war on terror
12 September 2001
President Bush chairs two more meetings of the NSC, stressing that the United States is at war with a new kind of enemy
British and American Representations of 9-11 Page 35