British and American Representations of 9-11 Read online

  In view of this reading, one could further remark that nothing is exactly new when it comes to the imaginary worlds of fiction , as postmodernism taught us, even if literary history had failed to do so before it. Literature is a continuum of palimpsests rewritten from different angles and inspired by diverse elements and events. If one were to look into twentieth-century literature , to avoid going back too far into the past, one could connect 9/11 fiction with the literary accounts of the World Wars, of the Holocaust or the Gulag, events equally unrepresentable and, it is safe to assume, of greater magnitude than the attacks on the World Trade Center . War fiction was traumatic, indeed, but it also offered an invaluable document of its time, added to the more traditional non-fiction sources, as literary texts can be considered (within the limits imposed by their conventions of fictionality ) inseparable from the so-called objective texts that circulate during the same historical context . Two questions arise: whether 9/11 fiction falls into one, more, or all of the following categories: trauma fiction , war literature , urban literature , or socially and politically engaged neorealist fiction , and which would be the best critical path for their investigation. Trauma is an important component of these writings, which justifies the niche of 9/11 fiction criticism being occupied, for the largest part, by analyses inspired by trauma studies. One could nevertheless assert that this is not the only approach possible, nor even the most apposite. Of course, experiments in critical theory have demonstrated that any form of interpretation may be applied with reasonable results to any text—since one may grasp whatever one regards as relevant in that text, and subsequently ground one’s line of argumentation in the theory that seems most appropriate. However, a further contention is that one should not approach 9/11 fiction along lines that are not tangential to culture and politics if one wants to grasp its meanings and the implications of the event on the world stage. This stems from the assumption that media discourse and political thinking inform the aesthetics of contemporary fiction and affect/construct identities at the micro and macro levels, revealing the complex relationship between the individual and history, while being, at the same time, carriers of fictionalisation themselves.

  The three discourses are thus viewed not as foregrounding reality , but as representations . That is why this book leaves postmodernism on the sidelines, where it is considered to have actually settled by itself, and proposes another direction in keeping with a more realist reading of the texts: an account of the way in which the marks of the political and media discourses can be traced at the level of fiction , with the attempt to prove that their imprint is manifest through context and text. Also highlighted is the reconfiguration of thoughts, ideas and (re)constructed images of reality in the context of an unprecedented rise of alterity awareness, with the intention to demonstrate that the three types of discourse , hybridised with and informed by specific ideologies and prejudices, accentuate, purposively or not, the differences between the poles of the classical West –East dichotomy. This entails taking a step into non-fiction , which is regarded as discursive and representational, therefore presenting fictionalised facts, a technique that has been borrowed by novelists and playwrights who wish to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction . Along the same lines, the ideology -generated interplay of selfhood and otherness is firstly identified outside the conventional world of fiction , in texts generally perceived as presenting the objective truth , and only after that in fiction . The architectural scaffolding of the following chapters is indeed a permanent vacillation between real/reality and unreality/simulacrum (a significant remainder of postmodernism or, rather, its advancement in the digital age), and their correlatives: discourse , representation and ideology , although emphasis is laid on literature , as apparent from the subtitle of this work. In particular, the study recounts the historical context of 9/11 , by referring to its encoding in official records (9/11 Commission Report, various presidential addresses to the American nation), in the media (primarily television and newspapers, as the new media were less significant at that time) and in literary texts whose role among the apparatuses of cultural and social significance is mapped and brought to the fore. It outlines the tenets of 9/11 fiction , focusing on its negotiation between the postmodern rewritings of modernism and the post-postmodern return to realism. As already suggested, trauma is not completely left aside, but its manifestations on both shores of the Atlantic are discussed in terms of the amplitude generated by its temporal and spatial distance. After the initial shock at the news of the attacks, and in the following days, when nous étions tous américains, to paraphrase Le Monde , the attitudinal patterns in Europe reconfigured, slowly (but surely) sliding towards indifference and even Schadenfreude. This is proof of the fact that Western identity is a mutable construct subject to change, and that it is made of multiple selves or ‘Wests’. The West is damaged in the twenty-first century by vanity—the Americans’ belief that they represent the ultimate superpower and the European pride as the cradle of Western civilisation . And yet, though shattered and fragmented, the West remains a unique self in relation to a threatening Other generically termed the ‘Islamist terrorist ’, which is why an important task is addressing post-9/11 Islamophobia in the media , in the public sphere and, not surprisingly, in literature too. In addition, recent years have witnessed the literary response of many Arab and Muslim writers who ‘have claimed a space for counter-narratives to the predominant white, national intellectual response to 9/11’ (Carosso 2014, 199). This is the reason a thorough overview of 9/11 fiction can no longer be imagined without giving a voice to otherness , as long as one admits that the new realism ‘eludes the divide between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic literatures ’ (Anjaria 2017).

  Therefore, the premise of this study is that 9/11 fiction has never dwelt in the ivory tower of high literature , but has mingled with other discourses of contemporaneity, attempting to become a voice of the public sphere with its oblique way of showing instead of bluntly telling, and by borrowing and embedding political statements and journalism into its fictional weavings, while also supporting non-fiction in achieving its manipulative ends. Twenty-first century realism is more political than personal, more globalised than individual, more outward than inward, which practically requires a recourse to history, politics and ideologies, and thus imposes the tools for its analysis. These tools are neither new nor revolutionary, because, as is the case with fiction , not much is new in literary criticism either. Apart from its obvious metatextual function, critical theory has its own hypertextual games, in which the approach to the literary text either emerges from other theories or represents a reaction to them. Furthermore, critical theory is ‘inescapably interdisciplinary’ (Culler 1997, 4), relying on philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, political or social theory, history, psychoanalysis, gender studies and others. It follows that an approach that brings all these together is least likely to let various aspects related to text and textuality escape. Since the entire scaffolding of this book is based on the conviction that realist literary texts are inseparable from so-called objective texts that circulate in a historical context , the only critical avenue envisaged as comprehensive enough to map 9/11 fiction as a form of textuality of recent history is New Historicism /Cultural Materialism.

  The two theories, fairly similar but with subtle differences at the level of the context in which the power relations operate at the time of the writing or at that of the reception (but which overlap, however, in the case of 9/11 fiction ), are useful both in exploring the relation between literature and history and in demonstrating the ‘ideological and political interests operating through literary texts’ (Brannigan 1998, 11). Their reading of the literary and non-literary texts in context , and of the ideological nature therein has been considered the way in which to inscribe 9/11 fiction within the wider frame of cultural dynamics, starting from Stephen Greenblatt’s assessment of literature as ‘part of the system of signs that constitutes a given culture ’ (2005, 6). Th
e goal of this approach, which Greenblatt named ‘cultural poetics’ before settling for New Historicism , is ‘to investigate both the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text’ (6). It follows that the relation between discourses should not be regarded as a transfer, as an appropriation from social and political discursive practices to the artistic ones, but rather as an exchange:We need to develop terms to describe the ways in which material—here official documents, private papers, newspaper clippings, and so forth—is transferred from one discursive sphere to another and becomes aesthetic property. It would, I think, be a mistake to regard this process as unidirectional—from social discourse to aesthetic discourse —not only because the aesthetic discourse in this case is so entirely bound up with capitalist venture but because the social discourse is already charged with aesthetic energies. (Greenblatt 2005, 27)

  Touched by the uncertainty of postmodernity, many seem less and less inclined to accept the dictatorship of the written word and the absolutist autocracy of history. Thus, suggesting that both history and literature are discursive formations which construct rather than reflect the past (a very recent one in the case of the attacks on the World Trade Center ), and that they are, in fact, constructed and mediated discourses only contingent with reality , one may approach them as representations . There is no specific grid—one cannot sedulously tick boxes or deconstruct a text into its grammatical features, therefore one should find a way of ‘linking poststructuralist linguistic tenets with politics and ideology ’ (Currie 1998, 87). Emphasis is, nevertheless, laid on the latter, because, after long years during which Structuralism and Deconstruction have dominated literary criticism , granting access to it only to the few ‘chosen ones’ who were able to cope with their complicated jargon, its simple language and its representation of theory without theory make New Historicism appealing. Despite their tendency to malign the close analysis of literary texts and their prevalent obsession with social and political contexts , Cultural Materialism and New Historicism have their merits in opening literary criticism to the study of historical contexts and the understanding of cultural and social differences. Today, Cultural Materialism and New Historicism have broadened their scope so as to address the question of marginalised identity more and more thoroughly. As ‘the disciplinary societies ’ (Foucault 1977)/‘the societies of control ’ (Deleuze 1992)/‘the ideological state apparatuses’ (Althusser 1969) have become global phenomena, it is only natural that the literary theories which examine their effects at the level of material practices represented in literature should also have been affected by globalisation . What is more, in an electronic age, the cornucopia of information outside the literary text urges the critic to expand his/her contextual analysis even further than in the case of texts belonging to the historical past. Ultimately, it is still about a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis, as the proponents of New Historicism /Cultural Materialism argued in the 1980s. However, in the case of very recent history, historicity is altered due to a misapprehension which has placed history in the past. Therefore, the discussion of contemporary discourse should, perhaps, rely less on historicity and more on concepts such as hegemony , globalisation, mass culture, subculture and representation , which seem adequate in the analysis of contemporary texts—in the broader sense of this term, which goes beyond language, covering all the conveyors of meaning.

  In keeping with Foucault’s understanding of discourse , the term is employed throughout this study as a representation of reality whose rules of formation are established by power structures, and impose, in turn, the discursive practices meant to create ‘the order of truth’, or the ‘truth ’ accepted as reality at a given moment in history under specific contextual circumstances. Thus, discourse is contextually dependent and impossible to assess objectively due precisely to the mutations that occur at its level (between then and now and, often, between here and there, I and the Other and so on). The author is included in this level—as a function of discourse (as Foucault argues in ‘What is an Author?’); however, s/he is, at the same time, external, inextricably subjected to the power relations outside the text and within the discursive practices of his/her time. Foucault’s views of history as dependent on power relations and discourse in context have been embraced here for their understanding of history and literature as textuality and representation . The latter is construed as an imperfect form of life imitation, and this imperfection is related to a series of factors outside the text: the author’s distance from the represented factual aspect/event (in time and space), his/her subjectivity (which may be wilful, with manipulative ends), but also various societal, political, economic and cultural constraints, which, for the sake of brevity, one may include under the term context . In cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s words, ‘representation does sort of carry with it the notion that something was there already and […] has been represented’ (1997, 6, emphasis in the original). ‘Something’ here may range from topics, people, events and situations, to politics and ideologies, which are endowed with meanings through words or images. Hence, Hall’s definition of representation is: ‘the way in which meaning is somehow given to the things which are depicted through the images or whatever it is, on screens or the words on a page which stand for what we’re talking about’ (1997, 6, emphasis in the original).

  These ‘words on a page’, figments of imagination or claims to representing reality alike, function through codes and conventions (language, tonality, styles, genres, among others), and ‘can never be completely divorced from political and ideological questions’ (Mitchell 1990, 15). This last aspect connects the concept of representation with the aims of the present book, which revolve around how politics and the media are realistically represented in literature , in reference to a specific political context —the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the ensuing ‘Global War on Terrorism ’. The notions of ideology and identity in contemporaneity, and truth as a discursive construct influenced by power structures, together with the assessment of the media as a communicator of politics , but also as a steady and reliable provider of non-literary texts necessary in the contextual analysis, should suff ice to justify the choice of New Historicism /Cultural Materialism as critical theories. Literature is regarded as a political and social factor able to communicate and even exert an influence. Conversely, through their nature as constructed discourses , but also through their incorporation into the literary text, politics and history become literature , which justifies the dual approach of looking into both literary and non-literary texts: an approach privileged in the following pages. It is for this reason that Chap. 2 has been imagined as closer to a study of history than to literary criticism.

  History becomes literature , then literature becomes ideology, thus inscribing itself in history and contributing, in turn, to changes at the level of identity paradigms. This justifies the two-part structure of this book: the first part, ‘Encoding September 11 in the Media and the Literary Text’, discusses the fictionalisation of history through the media and literature , while the second part, ‘Ideological Reconfigurations of Identity in the Literary Representations of 9/11’, is concerned with the way in which ideology informs both fiction and non-fiction and with how these two, in turn, construct or, at least, affect identities.

  Chapter 2, Making History: Politics, the Media and Literature in the Twenty-First Century, is dedicated to the historical context , in keeping with the tenets of New Historicism . More specifically, it is concerned with reports of the events whose occurrence determined, aside from extremely serious global consequences, the emergence of new forms of artistic expression meant to inscribe them in the cultural memory of Western civilisation . The attacks of 9/11 are documented starting with the official ‘9/11 Commission Report ’ (2004). The review of 9/11 Commission Report is corroborated with the way in which the event was presented in the media —firstly in television
, through the live broadcast from the disaster scene, and also through President George W. Bush’s televised interventions, and, during the following days, in the written press. By emphasising the idea that the attacks left the real and entered the area of representation as soon as they were broadcast, the subchapter analyses the first few minutes of the broadcast from a narratological perspective, proving that was merely an attempt at obtaining information and not one at providing it, and also that the discourse used on television , and not the event itself, ends up being a hypertext for ulterior references to 9/11 . By interviewing eye-witnesses, CNN transformed them into narrators who provided their own subjective interpretations and representations of the events, although their role should have been that of narratees.